We are delighted to welcome a number of new members of staff to the department, including Dr Anna French, Dr Cheryl Hudson, James Lowry and Harry Wood, who will be all be profiled in future posts. In the first place, we’d like to introduce Dr Seán Lucey, who is replacing Professor Sally Sheard during her period of research leave, and Dr Laura Sandy, Lecturer in the History of Slavery
Dr Seán Lucey has expertise in British and Irish health and social history. Much of his research focuses on the poor law, history of medical institutions, and comparative and regional healthcare. His most recent publications include the co-edited collection Healthcare in Ireland and Britain Since 1850: Voluntary, Comparative and Regional Perspectives (Institute of Historical Research; London, 2015), and his new monograph The End of the Irish Poor Law? Welfare and Healthcare Reform in Revolutionary and Independent Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2015), which is just published.
Seán joins us from Queen's University Belfast where he was an AHRC research fellow, and he previously held positions in Trinity College Dublin and Oxford Brookes University.
Dr Laura Sandy joins us from the University of Keele and adds a new dimension to the internationally important Centre for the Study of International Slavery. She has particular interest in those shadowy figures who lived their lives on the “edges” of slavery and often remain marginalised in the literature. In particular, she has looked at the overseer and his wife, the experiences of free people under slavery and those who chose to voluntarily enslaved themselves. She is currently working on a project about "Slave Stealing."
I am very pleased to be joining the University of Liverpool and working in a vibrant city at the very heart of the Atlantic world and the story of slavery. These subjects have taken me to archives in the UK and across America and it is now my proud ‘boast’ that I have conducted research in every former slave state! In fact, I come to Liverpool fresh from a research trip in Louisiana and Kentucky. When not travelling around America searching for the “hidden histories” of slavery, I have lived and worked in Manchester, Reading, Oxford, and Keele. It’s been an interesting and lively journey, but having arrived in Liverpool, finally, I feel like I am at home.
- Laura Sandy