This lecture offers an opportunity to reflect on how, by whom and for whom history is produced. It examines the teaching of public history in higher education, acknowledging the recent powerful calls for new kinds of curricula focused on ‘decolonisation’. The development of policy-oriented applied history is critically assessed, and despite opposition, the present day emerges as a period of unprecedented opportunity for very diverse forms of historical production that are informed by feminist principles and which extend the public profile of the history of feminism.

Lucy Delap is a Reader in Modern British and Gender history at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Murray Edwards College. She has published widely on the history of feminism, gender, labour and religion, including the prize-winning The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century in 2007, and Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain in 2011. She is currently working on a history of modern feminism titled Feminism: a useable history (Penguin), and collaborates with a team on a Leverhulme-funded project, The Business of Women’s Words, on feminist publishing and enterprise in late twentieth century Britain. She is a senior associate of History & Policy, and won the Royal Historical Society Public History (Public Debate and Policy) Prize in 2018 for her work with Prof Louise Jackson and Prof Adrian Bingham on the history of child sexual abuse.

Lecture: 18.00-19.30
Reception: 19.30-20.00