NETWORK MEMBERS

Lynn Abrams is Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow. She is a gender and social historian who  has researched and published in the field of children in the care system in Scotland including The Orphan Country: Children of Scotland's Broken Homes, 1845-Present day  (Edinburgh, 1999) and several research reports on institutional and foster care for the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry.

Peter Anderson is Professor of Twentieth-Century Spanish History in the School of History at the University of Leeds. His work has centred particularly on the regime of General Francisco Franco (1939-1975). His work includes the study of children in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), including the evacuation of nearly 4,000 children from the Basque Country to the United Kingdom. He has also published a monograph on the development of child-care institutions and child removal in Spain focusing especially on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Agnes Anna Arndt is a senior researcher at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at Dresden University of Technology and a lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. Her first monograph on the civil society discourses in the People's Republic of Poland (Campus, 2007) was awarded the Prize of the Foundation for German-Polish Collaboration. Her second monograph on the history of left-wing dissidence in Poland (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013) was honoured with the Prize of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In her current book project, Agnes is working on the legal and cultural history of the concept of “Kindeswohl” respectively the “best interests of the child” in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic from 1945 to 1990. Furthermore, she is leading a collaborative research project on the European history of children's rights in global perspective from 1924 to 2024.

Nelleke Bakker is a historian who worked as associate professor in the history of education at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, before she retired in 2020. She has published numerous academic books and articles on the history of childhood, (gender and) education, parenting, and child sciences. In more recent years her research focused particularly on (health) care arrangements for children. In 2021 she contributed a chapter on the Netherlands to the Final Report of the Irish Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes.

Felix Berth is an educational scientist and historian of education. He has been conducting research at the German Youth Institute on the history of early education in Germany since 2012. Prior to this, he worked for many years as a policy editor for the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He studied history and economics, earned his doctorate in educational sciences, and completed training in supervision. He is currently leading a DFG-funded project on the history of attachment theory as well as a project on experiences of injustice in residential care in a major German city between 1945 and 1990.

Judy Bolger is a PhD candidate at Trinity College, Dublin. Her PhD examined the social discourse surrounding impoverished mothers and women’s experiences of maternity and motherhood in Irish workhouses during the late nineteenth-century and this research was funded by the Trinity College, Dublin 1252 Postgraduate Research Scholarship. She has published works on mothers and the workhouse in Salvador Ryan (ed.), Birth and the Irish: a Miscellany (2021) and in Historical Studies, vol. 19 (2019). Judy works in the Academic Resource Office of Carlow College, St Patrick and is the Book Review Editor for the Women’s History Association of Ireland. She has a keen interest in the history of poverty, motherhood and infant care. Her M.Phil. thesis research examined the social history of Irish breastfeeding during the nineteenth century.

Sarah-Anne Buckley is Associate Professor in History at the University of Galway, Ireland and Vice- Dean for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Staff Development in CASSCS. Co-PI of the Tuam Oral History Project she is an expert in the history of child welfare and gender history in modern Ireland. Recent publications include Jyoti Atwal, Ciara Breathnach and Sarah-Anne Buckley (eds.), Gender History and Ireland, 1852-1922, Routledge India, New Delhi, 2022; Francis Devine, Olivier Coquelin and Sarah-Anne Buckley (eds.), Retreat from Revolution: Irish Working-Class Politics in the 1920s, Umiskin Press, 2024 and Caroline McGregor, Carmel Devaney, Sarah-Anne Buckley, Language, Terminology and Representation Relating to Ireland’s Institutions Historically Known as ‘Mother and Baby Homes’, ‘County Homes’ and related Institutions (2023).

Olivia Dee is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast, conducting oral history research on various aspects of pregnancy in the UK. She has published on many aspects of women’s history including abortion reform, contraception and mother and baby homes. She is currently working on Invisible Labour, a podcast on women’s experiences of unmarried pregnancy in Northern Ireland. Her monograph, The Anti-Abortion Campaign 1966-1989 was published in 2019.

Isabelle Hollingdale is a first-year PhD student in the School of History at University of Leeds. Her project compares Spanish and Argentine twentieth-century child removal, and uses a mixed-methods explores what took place in each case, as well as current efforts to come to terms with this historical trauma through activism and art.

Katie Joice is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at Birkbeck College London. Her first book, Mothering in the Frame: Child Psychoanalysis and Observational Film in Postwar America and Britain (forthcoming) examines the ways in which child psychiatrists and psychoanalysts used research film to develop new ideas about mother love and maternal deprivation after WWII. She has published several articles on the topic of babies and institutions, including 'René Spitz’s Empty Frames: ‘Hospitalism', Screen Analysis and the Birth of Infant Psychiatry' and 'Narrating the Infant: A New Look at the Films of James and Joyce Robertson' (both Psychoanalysis and History, 2022). Her new project investigates the network of researchers and activists who challenged the institutionalisation of disabled children in 1960s and '70s Britain.

Michael Lambert is a Research Fellow and Director of Widening Participation at Lancaster Medical School. He is a historian of the welfare state in Britain and its Empire during the twentieth century, focusing on the place of children and families. His research has contributed to public inquiries into historical child harms by statutory and voluntary organisations. These include the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry where he was commissioned to undertake work on child migration, and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry into the forced adoption of children of unmarried mothers.

Georgina Laragy is Assistant Professor of Public History at Trinity College Dublin. I work between Trinity and Glasnevin Cemetery. My research and teaching interests lie in social history of Ireland of the 19th and 20th centuries. Specifically in death and burial, poverty and childhood, alongside welfare institutions including workhouses and psychiatric hospitals. Recent publications include O. Purdue & G. Laragy, Poverty, Children and the Poor Law in Industrial Belfast, 1880-1918 (Liverpool University Press, 2024) which examines the treatment of children and infants by the welfare authorities in Belfast in a period of huge growth for the city.

Nazan Maksudyan is a professor of social and cultural history at the Freie Universität Berlin and a Senior Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin) in the ERC project, ‘Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789-1914’. Her research mainly focuses on the social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, with special interest in children and youth, gender, forced migration, humanitarianism, sound and media, and history of science.

Laura McAtackney is Professor in the Radical Humanities Laboratory and Archaeology, University College Cork, Ireland, and Professor of Heritage Studies at the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is also Docent in Contemporary Historical Archaeology at the University of Oulu, Finland. Amongst many interests her research focuses on material-based approaches to understanding institutions, post-conflict and post-colonial societies. She is currently the PI of an Independent Research Fund Denmark Project Enduring Materialities of Colonialism: temporality, spatiality and memory on St Croix, USVI (EMoC) (2019-2024).

Antonella Schena is the head of the Archive, Museum and Cultural Activities Service of the Istituto degli Innocenti of Florence, one of the oldest public institutions in Italy, founded in the 15th century to care and protection abandoned children and to promote children’s rights. She studied History at the University of Florence and for many years worked on the documentation and organization of knowledge, taking care of the creation of the first Italian thesaurus on childhood and adolescence, thematic websites and online virtual exhibitions. She currently co-ordinates the activities of the Archive and Museum of the Innocenti, promoting projects to enhance the historical and artistic documentary heritage of the Institute of the Innocenti.

 
Beatrice Scutaru is a historian of post-1945 Europe. Her research focuses on childhood, migration, and the Cold War period. She is particularly interested in the movement of people, ideas and ideologies across national borders. She has conducted research on child protection and institutionalisation in Romania and France since the end of the Second World War. She has recently co-authored the first synthetic overview of the history of child institutionalisation in France since 1945, Cloîtrées. Filles et religieuses dans les internats de rééducation du Bon Pasteur d’Angers, 1940-1990 (Presses Universitaires de France).

Sarah Smed is the museum leader at The Danish Welfare Museum. She works across various agencies and professions, forging sustainable partnerships with public bodies, NGOs, educational institutions, and closely collaborating with people with lived experiences from the social welfare sector. Sarah played a key role in social justice work that led to a national apology in 2019 to the Care Leavers from children’s homes, based on research conducted at the museum. From 2020 to 2022, she headed an investigation into neglect in Danish special care institutions, which also resulted in a national apology.

Elizabeth White is currently Associate Professor of Global History at the University of the West of England. She has also worked at the universities of Ulster, Birkbeck, Sussex, Warwick and Birmingham. She has published widely on the history of childhood, including A Modern History of Russian Childhood (Bloomsbury, 2020). Her current research project is on the internationalisation of children's rights in the UN, 1945-1989.