About
57
Publications
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374
Citations
Introduction
Leonie Hannan is a social and cultural historian working on intellectual life in the long eighteenth century, with a focus on themes of gender, material culture and domestic space. Her second monograph is published with Manchester University Press and entitled A Culture of Curiosity: Scientific Enquiry in the Eighteenth-Century Home. An edited volume for Routledge (with Olwen Purdue) on Dealing with Difficult Pasts: the Public History in Ireland is out with Routledge.
Skills and Expertise
Current institution
Additional affiliations
April 2011 - March 2015
Position
- Fellow
Description
- Initiating new opportunities for using UCL’s museum collections in teaching and research. Course Co-Ordinator for core module – Object Lessons – on UCL’s flagship interdisciplinary undergraduate degree (the BASc). Demonstrating the value of object-based learning through research and publication on the application of this learning method in higher education. The role also included managing a large Jisc-funded collaborative project focused on the creation of Open Educational Resources and working
Education
September 2005 - October 2009
September 2003 - September 2004
October 1999 - June 2002
Publications
Publications (57)
During the period of the Enlightenment, the word ‘home’ could refer to a specific and defined physical living space, the location of domestic life, and a concept related to ideas of roots, origins, and retreat. The transformations that the Enlightenment encouraged created the circumstances for the concept of home to change and develop in the follow...
In this paper, we analyze G. Stanley Hall’s Senescence: The Last Half of Life (1922) as a personal narrative and scientific account of aging in the long nineteenth century. We approach the text with a critical perspective on the decline narrative in aging studies, but also by engaging with Hall’s narrative in the form of life review. Our analysis i...
This article uses interview data gathered during a collaborative cross-disciplinary project undertaken in 2016 to explore experiences of longevity in qualitative detail with a small cohort of Northern Irish participants. The project was inspired by Penelope Lively’s autobiography Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time (2013, 4, 199), which docu...
What does material culture tell us about gendered identities and how does gender reveal the meaning of spaces and things?
If we look at the objects that we own, covet and which surround us in our everyday culture, there is a clear connection between ideas about gender and the material world. This book explores the material culture of the past to sh...
What does material culture tell us about gendered identities and how does gender reveal the meaning of spaces and things?
If we look at the objects that we own, covet and which surround us in our everyday culture, there is a clear connection between ideas about gender and the material world. This book explores the material culture of the past to sh...
This article explores the home as a site of ‘scientific’ enquiry in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland via the experiences of female experimenters. The focus of their investigation was the cultivation of silkworms for the purposes of making silk and substituting expensive foreign imports with domestic manufacture. This research argues that enqu...
The general broadening in recent years of what counts as legitimate
learning has included an interest in objects, including those from curated
collections such as artefacts, natural history specimens and archival items,
which may have complex cultural or scientific meaning in their own right.
A more sophisticated interaction with objects has be...
Repetition has long been an important tool in such fields of humanities research as literary studies and art history, in which scholars repeatedly return to texts and images to develop critically engaged understandings. Historians also need to adopt repetition as a distinct methodology, particularly in relation to the material world. Repetitive eng...
Becoming a woman intellectual in early modern England was no straightforward task. Financial dependence, lack of personal autonomy, marriage and motherhood could all bring pressures to bear on practices of self-development. However, it was from within these circumstances that women found ways to engage with the life of the mind. Moreover, the forms...
The paths by which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English women came to the task of intellectual thought were varied. Small details of personal histories interacted with larger dynamics of culture and society and created highly individualised contexts for intellectual work. In childhood, girls’ and boys’ educations diverged and for most young...
In a period before women had equal educational opportunities, the home was an important arena for self-education. Women worked, in the home, in ways that were not confined to the rigours of household management: they spent time reading, thinking and writing. Female letter-writers testified to the importance of their environment in shaping their men...
A short final chapter which states the case for women’s mass participation in cultures of knowledge and considers longer term change over time. Having established that many more women participated in the world of ideas, it is proposed that these women represent a seedbed of change for future generations of intellectually aspiring women.
Letter-writing was an instrument for self-education and provided the writer with the space to rehearse critical skills. Letter-writing started in childhood, as a tool in parents’ strategies to educate and socialise their children. Once the childhood exercise had been converted into a lifelong epistolary habit, however, its scope broadened – laying...
Writing, like reading, was an activity that held a magnetic draw for some women of this period. Writing could be a strong impulse, a necessity that kept the mind free, the thoughts flowing and the writer psychologically stable. Eighteenth-century correspondents commonly spent many lines of ink on the very subject of how writing letters to their fri...
Here the key themes of the book are introduced and the historical and historiographical context is set. The chapter discusses, women’s literacy and access to education, the social and cultural context in which intellectual women worked, correspondence culture and the sites and communities of exchange. Finally, the choice of primary sources and meth...
Women of Letters writes a new history of English women’s intellectual worlds using their private letters as evidence of hidden networks of creative exchange. This is the first detailed study to situate correspondence as the central social practice in the development of female intellectual thought in the period c.1650-1750. The main argument of the...
Lindsay O’Neill. The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World. The Early Modern Americas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 264. $47.50 (cloth). - Volume 54 Issue 3 - Leonie Hannan
The use of museum collections as a path to learning for university students is fast becoming a new pedagogy for higher education. Despite a strong tradition of using lectures as a way of delivering the curriculum, the positive benefits of ‘active’ and ‘experiential learning’ are being recognised in universities at both a strategic level and in dail...
This article explores collaborative scholarship on the margins of intellectual life in eighteenth-century England via a close examination of George Ballard's collected correspondence from women letter-writers. Ballard was both a man of trade and an antiquary, and his modest social status inhibited his freedom to move in scholarly circles. Ballard's...
Drawing on national and regional letter collections dating from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this article explores women's experiences of the life of the mind through an analysis of their letter-writing. This study also highlights the shortcomings of the compartmentalised
nature of scholarship on women's writing and intellec...
This article uses women's letter-writing from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to explore the home as a site of female intellectual endeavour. Far from representing a static backdrop to the action of domestic life, the home played a dynamic role in women's experiences of the life of the mind and shaped the ways in which women tho...
