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Dr Claire Phillips

Profile summary

Professional biography

I am a historian of early modern and modern British History. I completed my PhD at the University of Leeds in 2017 with a thesis entitled 'The Care of Sick Children in Eighteenth-Century England', and I am currently revising this as a monograph, under contract with Amsterdam University Press. 

My ongoing research focuses on children in Welsh Workhouses, examining the ways in which children were deposited in these institutions, and how various locations in Wales housed, cared for, and trained these children. Children were boarded out, either with family members of foster families, or placed in Cottage Homes, in an attempt to keep them out of workhouses which left the children with stigma throughout their lives. 

Research interests

I have wide ranging research interests in early modern and modern childhood and youth, gender and the family, and welfare history. 

Teaching interests

I teach on, and am a module team member for, the following modules: A225: The British Isles and the Modern World, 1789-1914; A329: The Making of Welsh History. 

I teach on the following modules: A223: Early Modern Europe: Society and Culture, 1500-1789; and A883 MA History Part 1.

Publications

“So They May be Usefull to Themselves”: Work and Apprenticeship in the Ackworth Branch Foundling Hospital, 1757–1773 (2023)
Phillips, Claire
Family & Community History, 25(3) (pp. 219-233)


Child Abandonment in England, 1741–1834: The Case of the London Foundling Hospital (2019-07-29)
Phillips, Claire
Genealogy, 3(3) (p 35)


The education of children in London’s foundling hospital, c. 1800–1825 (2018-03-08)
Rennie, Claire Marie
Childhood in the Past, 11(1) (pp. 8-20)


The Treatment of Whooping Cough in Eighteenth-Century England (2016)
Rennie, Claire
Ex Historia, 8 (pp. 1-33)