• Staff directory
• Staff search

Qualifications

PhD University of Essex

Course development and teaching

I am currently a member of two course teams, The uses of social science (DD206) and Personal lives and social policy (DD305). As a Staff Tutor I am responsible, with a team of colleagues, for the presentation of the Faculty's courses in the London Region and for the recruitment, development and support of the Associate Lecturers who tutor them. Prior to my full-time appointment as a Staff Tutor, I taught with The Open University on a number of social science modules.

Research interests

History of the family, fatherhood and masculinity, contemporary families and their alternatives, domestic space and family life, relationships between social policy and the family, poverty and the 19th century Poor Law. I am a member of the Family and Relationships Programme of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance.

My PhD research investigated the meanings and experiences of fatherhood in Victorian England. It looked at autobiographical accounts of parents and parenting, legal disputes about childcare and children, and debates about the relationships between fatherhood, the law, religion, and family-related policies. This included working-class, middle-class and aristocratic families, developing a framework for locating fatherhood both within networks of family, kinship and community as well as wider social and legal contexts. I have continued to develop my research in this area.

For my MA, I undertook an oral history research project into an alternative community in the 1970s, looking at the influences which shaped the dynamics of communal life and the ways that participants sought to develop social relationships which challenged the notion of family as a social ideal.

I began my university education as a mature student at the Polytechnic of Central London, where I did an interdisciplinary degree, including history, sociology and politics, after working for a number of years in voluntary and community groups.

PhD supervision

PhD supervision interests include: histories of welfare, the New Poor Law, workhouses and philanthropic institutions, families and gender, masculinity and families, histories of domestic life (19th-20th Centuries), alternative communities.

Recent publications

Doolittle, M. 'The Duty to Provide: Fathers, Families and the Workhouse in England 1880-1914', in The Welfare State and the 'Deviant Poor' in Europe, 1870-1933 , eds: Althammer, B., Gestrich, A. and Gründler, J., Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming 2013.

Ribbens McCarthy, J., Doolittle, M. and Sclater, S. D., Understanding Family Meanings: A Reflective Text, Policy Press, forthcoming 2012.

Doolittle, M. (2011) 'Time, Space and Memories: The father's chair and grandfather clocks in Victorian working-class domestic lives', in Home Cultures, Vol. 8.

Doolittle, M (2009) 'Fatherhood and Family Shame: Masculinity, Welfare and the Workhouse in Late Nineteenth Century England', in The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800, eds Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin and Abigail Willis, Palgrave MacMillan.

Doolittle, M. (2007) 'Fatherhood, Religious Belief and the Protection of Children in Nineteenth-Century English Families' in Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century, eds Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers, Palgrave Macmillan.

Doolittle, M., Davidoff, L., Fink, J. and Holden, K. (1999) The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy in Modern England, 1840–1960, Addison Wesley, Longman.

A repository of research publications and other research outputs can be viewed at The Open University's Open Research Online.

Last updated: 2 April 2013