Meet our steering group

Ruth Beecher is an historian of medicine, welfare and childhood in Britain, Ireland and the US. She currently leads a project to produce the first social, cultural and medical history into recovery from childhood sexual abuse from the 1950s to the present. Her first book, Community Health Practitioners and Child Sexual Abuse in the Family, 1970s-2010s, was published with Palgrave Macmillan this year. Beecher is also the founder of the heritage charity Úna Gan a Gúna: Irish Women’s Oral History Collective which gathers and preserves the stories of  women born in twentieth-century Ireland and in the diaspora.

Emily Bridger is an Associate Professor in History at the University of Exeter. Her research explores histories of gender, violence, and memory in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. She is currently PI of the UKRI-funded project South Africa’s Hidden War: Histories of Sexual Violence from Apartheid to the Present.

Lauren Cantillon is a Lecturer in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. Her research encompasses media texts, media reception, and media production through a feminist interdisciplinary lens in order to explore how hegemonic power shapes the hearability and speakability of marginalized and/or ‘difficult’ knowledge from past and present – most recently in relation to genocide and sexual violence.

Victoria Hoyle is is a Senior Lecturer in Public History at the University of York. She is a historian of twentieth century child welfare and social care, with a focus on understandings of and responses to child sexual abuse. Her first book The Remaking of Archival Values was published by Routledge in 2022. She is Principal Investigator of Remembering Together: Co-creating a ‘Living Archive’ Toolkit for Child Sexual Abuse Activism, 1960-2024 (2026-2028). She has published articles in the British Journal of Social Work, Child and Family Social Work, Medical Humanities, the Journal of the History of Medicine and the Allied Sciences, and Archival Science.

Rhian Elinor Keyse is a Lecturer in Global Historical Studies at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She is a social and cultural historian of gender in modern Anglophone Africa, with particular interests in Ghanaian and Kenyan history. Her research interests encompass histories of gender-based violence, law, medicine, humanitarianism and human rights. She is currently preparing her first monograph based on her doctoral research which explored international responses to forced and early marriage in British colonial Africa, c.1920-1962. Her current research projects explore histories of domestic and sexual abuse in Ghana and Kenya, and the uses of forced marriage in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution and its aftermath. She also has a growing interest in the impacts of trauma on pedagogy, drawing on trauma-informed approaches as well as insights from critical trauma studies.

Jana Králová is a Researcher and Social Work academic at Edinburgh Napier University, as well as Visiting Fellow of the Centre for Death and Society at University of Bath. Jana’s research challenges the conceptualisation of human rights and the notion of social exclusion in public policy. Jana’s research into social death produced an innovative theoretical framework which enables ‘inclusion by default’ of all human beings and give rise to ‘humane rights’. 

Jennifer Putnam is the DPAA Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans and a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) Conny Kristel Fellow for 2023/2024. She recently received her PhD in History from Birkbeck College, University of London, where her research was funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Bonnart-Braunthal Trust. Jennifer’s work is interdisciplinary, as she holds an MPhil in Linguistics from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Contemporary History and Politics from Birkbeck College. She is also a board member of the Art Deco Society UK and the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology.