Dr Lucy Noakes

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Lucy Noakes

           

arts research University of Brighton

L.Noakes@brighton.ac.uk

Dr Lucy Noakes is a cultural and social historian who has worked in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton since 2007. Her research focuses on the British experience and memory of total warfare in the twentieth century with a particular emphasis on gender. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Honorary Secretary of the Social History Society, and is hosting the Annual Conference of the Society at the University of Brighton in April 2012.  Within the University she was a founding member, and current member of the Steering Committee, of the Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories.

Noakes' 1998 monograph War and the British: Gender and National Identity, 1939-1991 continues to be cited in much current research into the social and cultural history of Second World War Britain and led to a recent piece of research examining the memories of that war recorded on the BBC 'People's War' online archive (see Research Activity pages for details). The ways that war informs British national identity, and its place in popular memory, continue to be central to her work, leading to recent articles in BBC History magazine, work on the website Open Democracy and the organisation of two conferences in 2011: one in collaboration with the Royal Marines Museum entitled War, Silence and Memory in Modern Britain and the other at the University of Brighton entitled The Second World War: Popular Culture and Cultural Memory. This was orgainsed in collabroation with Dr Juliette Pattinson of Strathclyde University and Dr Petra Rau of the University of Portsmouth and an edited volume of papers from the conference will be published by Continuum in 2013, with the provisonal title Keep Calm and Carry On: Britain and the Cultural Memory of the Second World War.

Her ongoing interest in war and gender informed her next major piece of work, examining the relationship between gender and the military, published as a series of articles and book chapters, and as the monograph  Women in the British Army: War and the Gentle Sex 1907-1948 (London: 2006). This piece of research took her to Australia in 2006 where, supported by a British Academy Grant, she worked at Macquarie University, Sydney, tracing the history of ex-Servicewomen migrants from Britain following the First World War. She has recently published two pieces of research in connection with this project: 'From War Service to Domestic Service', in Twentieth Century British History (22: 1, 2011) and 'Our Excess Girls' for BBC History Magazine.

Noakes is currently working on two distinct but inter-related research projects. The first is a study of death, grief and mourning in Second World War Britain, which will be published as a monograph by Manchester University Press, and the second is an examination of civil defence in Twentieth Century Britain. She supervises PhD and MPhil students working on histories of war and gender and welcomes informal enquiries from potential students wanting to undertake research in these or related fields.