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Research Spotlight: Dr Rebecca Jennings
5 December 2022
Meet Rebecca, Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Faculty's new Vice-Dean (Equality, Diversity & Inclusion).
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at UCL
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of History where I teach Modern British history, gender history and the history of sexuality. I’m also excited to be taking on the role of Vice-Dean EDI in SHS from January. Equality, diversity and inclusion has been an area I’ve been passionate about and actively involved in since I joined UCL in 2016. I was formerly the Inclusion Lead in History and had the opportunity to get involved in work around the BAME Awarding Gap and Athena Swan, as well as setting up departmental staff/student networks. I am a Dignity Advisor, working with the central EDI team to provide support mechanisms for staff and students who experience bullying and harassment. As a gay woman, I am also keen to promote an inclusive environment for LGBTQ+ staff and students at UCL and have been a member of the LGBTQ+ Equality Steering Group for several years and now also sit on the recently convened LGBTQ+ Implementation Group. I’m looking forward to getting to know many more of the people who are doing important work on EDI in the Faculty and supporting the Faculty’s development in this area.
Tell us about your research
My research explores histories of gender and sexuality in 20th century Britain and Australia, with a particular focus on lesbian history. I am a social and cultural historian and am interested in the everyday lives and communities of ‘ordinary’ people as well as drawing on queer historical approaches to trace cultural representations of non-normative sexual and gender identities. There are very few surviving written records in my field, so I work a lot with oral history and am fascinated by ideas of selfhood and the construction of personal narratives. Transnational networks and the exchange of ideas and social and political practices across national boundaries have been an enduring aspect of LGBTQ+ histories and my work also engages with transnational histories of sexuality. At the moment, I am just finishing a monograph, Lesbian Intimacies: Desire, domesticity and kinship in post-war Britain and Australia, and looking forward to starting a new project.
What has been your most memorable career moment so far?
An obvious answer would be finally getting my first permanent academic job in 2018, after 15 years of working in the profession! Actually the most memorable moment would probably be the launch of my book, Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History in 2016. I was living in the UK when the book was published and wasn’t planning to have a launch, but a friend in Sydney encouraged me to hold one there. The book drew extensively on oral history interviews with Sydney lesbians and, as well as academic colleagues and LGBTQ+ historians, I invited the interview participants and their friends. It was a very hot day in February and we were not expecting many people to come to a fairly small room in a local library. However, we were wrong! The handful of loyal colleagues who had kindly come to support me were squeezed into a huge crowd of older lesbians who had travelled from around Sydney, rural NSW and even interstate to attend! It was a truly humbling experience because, after I had talked a little about the book and a couple of the women I had interviewed had shared some funny stories of their own experience, I spent several hours at the front of the room hearing from many of the attendees about their own fascinating stories. As it turned out, my book launch was the first opportunity they had had to mark the significance of their life stories and it brought home to me how important it is to recognise and value diverse histories and experiences.
What would you do (for a career) if you weren't doing this?
I would have a small-holding in Northumberland and divide my time between growing my own vegetables, foraging, walking and writing.
What are your main interests outside of work?
I have two children so my interests are mostly their interests these days. I spend a fair amount of my weekends shivering on the sidelines of football and rugby pitches! When I’m not doing that, I love hiking and running, growing things in my allotment, baking cakes and doing jigsaws.
Where's top of your list of places to visit?
I lived in Australia for 7 years before coming to UCL so Sydney is always top of my wishlist for places to (re)visit. I find it increasingly difficult to justify the environmental impact of the long flight, though, so top of my local list of places to visit is the Isle of Skye.
If you had to eat one meal, every day for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Toast and a selection of jams with a pot of tea.
Which famous person in history would you want to spend the day with?
It probably ought to be a famous LGBTQ+ person like Anne Lister, but I spend a lot of my time thinking about those people, so actually I would choose Thomas Cromwell. I studied the Tudors for A’ Level and sometimes think I could have had an alternate career as an Early Modernist, but my real fascination with Thomas Cromwell came from reading Hilary Mantel’s novels. She brought him to life in a way none of my A’ Level textbooks ever did (!) and he is such an intriguing character. As a man from humble origins, I would love to know what he really thought of the aristocrats he had to work with and to hear his stories of travelling around Europe as a hired soldier in his youth. Mostly, though, I want to know if he always understood that Henry VIII would probably turn on him one day and how he balanced his career and family ambitions with the awareness that political ruin and potentially execution were possibilities in his future.
What book is currently on your bedside table?
I currently have a (slightly hazardous) towering stack of books on my bedside table. It is mostly a mixture of crime, autobiography and trans history. Right now I am reading two books – Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke and Zoe Playdon’s The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes – and looking forward to starting Georgina Lawton’s raceless, which was a Christmas present.