Leanne Calvert

Leanne is a Lecturer in History, specialising in women's and gender history, across the long eighteenth-century. She was previously a Research Fellow in Intangible Cultural Heritage in the History Group (2017-19). Leanne is a historian of women, gender and the family, and her research interests include the family and its relationships, the life-cycle, religion (with an emphasis on Presbyterianism and Dissenting traditions) and migration. 

Current Project:

Sexuality & Social Control: Irish Presbyterians in the Atlantic World, 1717-1830.

This project compares how sexual behaviour and sexuality was subject to social control by Presbyterian communities in Ireland and North America, between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Approximately 1/4 million people migrated from Ireland to North America during this period, the overwhelming majority of whom (almost 70%) were Presbyterians from the province of Ulster. Motivated by a desire for greater economic opportunity, political and religious freedom, individuals, whole families and entire congregations travelled across the Atlantic. Once they arrived in the New World, these Presbyterian migrants reconstructed the communities that they left behind in Ireland, beginning with their system of church court discipline. Using the minutes of these church courts, this project explores the extent to which Presbyterian standards of behaviour were translated with this migration movement. In doing so, this project interrogates the relationship between sexuality, religion and migration.

This project is funded by a number of awarding bodies, including:

• British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant Scheme
• Research Fellowship from the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia
• Women's History Association of Ireland, Anna Parnell Travel Grant

Previous Projects:

Leanne has published widely on the family, sex and marriage in Ireland. She has published in Analecta Hibernica, Women's History Review, Journal of Family History, Irish Economic and Social History, and Irish Historical Studies.  She is currently the co-Director of the Perceptions of Pregnancy Researchers' network with Dr. Jennifer Evans.

Leanne completed her Ph.D. at Queen's University, Belfast in 2015, entitled 'Love, Life and the Family in the Ulster Presbyterian community, 1780-1844'. Before joining the University of Hertfordshire, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher on an AHRC-funded project entitled 'Bad Bridget: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918', held jointly between Ulster University and Queen's University, Belfast.

Leanne is interested in the following broad areas:

• The History of the Family and its Relationships
• The Household
• Religion and the Family, particularly the Presbyterian community
• Women's History
• Gender History
• Irish History
• Long Eighteenth-century, c. 1680-1850

Leanne's teaching specialisms include:

• The Family, Gender and Household in History
• Religion and the Family
• Social History
• Long Eighteenth-Century

Leanne currently teaches on the following modules:

5HUM1158: Hearth and Heart. Family Life in the Long Eighteenth-Century.

5HUM1165: Postcards from the Empire. Experiences of British Imperialism.

6HUM1208: Migrants and Minorities, c. 1688-1850.

7HUM1106: Migration of Beliefs and Traditions (MA Folklore)

Previous teaching:

4HUM1104 The Fight for Rights: Freedom and Oppression, 1790s -1990s

5HUM1083 Nation and Identity: Newly Independent States in Interwar Europe, 1918-39

6HUM1153 How the Victorians Saw the World Abroad