CANCELLED: Histories of the Welfare State

Dr Emily Baughan

Senior Lecturer in 19th/20th Century British History at School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities, University of Sheffield

My first book, Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism and Empire, was published in 2021 with the University of California Press. It analysed the intersection of liberal internationalism and British imperialism, as expressed by a burgeoning humanitarian movement between the two world wars and during the era of decolonization. During my research on this project, I worked with Save the Children UK as a research fellow, and organised an international conference for Save the Children’s centenary in 2019 on the importance of histories of aid today. 

My current book project, Love’s Labour: a history of childcare, examines the political economy of childhood, exploring the dialogue between Western states and families about the care of their youngest members in the modern era. Tracing patterns of childcare from the decline of private wetnursing in the mid-nineteenth century to the present-day marketized sector, Love’s Labour shows that patchy childcare solutions have usually expressed the tensions between the economic citizenship of women and children, which have yet to be resolved.