Professor Rebecca Jennings

Rebecca Jennings is Professor of Modern Gender History. She completed her PhD at the University of Manchester in 2003, where she taught for a few years before taking up a research fellowship at Macquarie University, Sydney. She joined UCL History in 2016.

Rebecca teaches on the history of gender and sexuality in modern Britain. Her research focuses on twentieth-century British and Australian lesbian history and she is particularly interested in notions of selfhood and subjectivity; personal testimonies and oral history; intimacy, kinship and family life; cultural representations of lesbianism; and sexual subcultures. Rebecca is currently working on a project exploring the entanglement of lesbian and trans subjectivity in post-war Britain.

Rebecca is currently the Admissions Tutor in History and Vice Dean (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) in the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences.

Major publications

• Lesbian Intimacies and Family Life: Desire, domesticity and kinship in Britain and Australia, 1945-2000 (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)
• Unnamed Desires: A Sydney lesbian history (Melbourne: Monash UP, 2015)
• Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A lesbian history of post-war Britain (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007)
• A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and sex between women since 1500 (Santa Barbara: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007)

For a full list of publications, see Rebecca's Iris profile.

Teaching (on research leave 2025-26) 

• Personal Testimonies of Twentieth Century Britain (Special Subject)
• Gender and Sexuality in Modern Britain, 1850 to the present (MA optional module)
• Challenging the Gender Binary in Modern Britain (MA optional module)

Doctoral supervision

• Natalie Abbott, ‘Empowering LGBTQ+ Youth Through Digital Archiving: A Critical Pedagogical Approach’. 
• Ellen Durban, ‘Marriage, Motherhood, and Divorce of Women Who Desired Women in England after 1945’.
• Beth Charlton, ‘Lesbian London: Social Life, Space and Networks in the Lives of LGBTQ+ Women in London, 1970 - c. 2000.’
• Ryan Kearney, ‘Tracing Birmingham’s LGBTQ+ Venues from Memory, 1966-1987’.
• Daniela Belmar Mac-Vicar, ‘Love as an affective orientation: Between subjective experiences and social norms in romantic relationships, Santiago, Chile 1884-1924’.
• Claire Holliss, ‘How can Queer History be effectively included in the 16-18 curriculum and what might the consequences be for wider curricular thought? An action research case study’.
• Samuel Vermote, ‘The (in)visible father: lesbian artificial insemination in Britain from the seventies to late eighties’.
• Holly Smith, ‘Up in the Air: High-Rise Housing and the Public in Post-War Britain’.
• Amy Miller, ‘The Globetrotter: Cosmopolitan Travel, Connecting Cultures and Conjuring the “Authentic” East, 1870-1920’.