Dr Charmian Mansell

Charmian Mansell is a Research Associate on the Legacies of the British Slave Trade project. She joins UCL while on secondment from a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. She has previously held a Lectureship in Early Modern British History at Queen Mary University of London, and postdoctoral posts at the University of Oxford and the Institute of Historical Search.  She was also a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Leverhulme-funded project Women's Work in Rural England, 1500-1700 at the University of Exeter.

She is an economic and social historian of early modern England. She has published on the histories of work and gender, labour freedom/unfreedom, and ideas of community. Her forthcoming monograph, Female Servants in Early Modern England challenges deeply-entrenched tropes in the scholarship of female service using court testimony. Her second major research project is titled ‘Everyday Travel and Communities in Early Modern England’ and draws on depositional evidence to analyses everyday journeys made by individuals beyond the boundaries of parish. As a Research Associate on the Legacies of the British Slave Trade project, she is investigating British-based investment in the transatlantic trade in enslaved African people. The project will launch a free-to-use database of 12,000 individual investors, their connections to organisations and places, and the crossings that transported enslaved African people to the Americas.
 

Publications

• Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press 2023). 
• C. Mansell, ‘Beyond the home: experiences of female service in early modern England’ Gender and History, 33:1, (2021), 24-49
• C. Mansell, ‘The variety of women's experiences as servants in early modern England: evidence from church court depositions’, Continuity and Change, 33:3 (2018), 315 – 338
• C. Mansell and M. Hailwood (eds.), ‘Court Depositions of South West England, 1500-1700’ (University of Exeter, 2018). This freely available, online resource features 80 transcribed, annotated court depositions for use in teaching and research.
• C. Mansell, ‘Objecting to Youth: English Society, Service and the Statute of Artificers, 1564-1641’ in J. Whittle and T. Lambrecht (eds.), Service and The Labour Laws in Europe, c.1400-1900, (Boydell, in press 2023).
• C. Mansell, ‘Defining the boundaries of community? The expulsion of pregnant unmarried women in early modern England’ in N. Pullin and K. Woods (eds.), Cultures of Exclusion in Early Modern Britain, 1600-1750, (Routledge, 2021).
• C. Mansell, ‘Female servants and the village community in south-west England 1560-1640: the labour laws reconsidered’ in J. Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe, c.1400-1900, (Boydell, 2017), pp.77-94.

Grants/Fellowships 

Charmian has held several major research fellowships. She currently holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and has also held a Women in Humanities Writing Fellowship at the University of Oxford and an Economic History Society Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research. In Spring 2024, she will take up a fellowship at the Huntington Library in California.