Dr Christina de Bellaigue

I am interested in the social and cultural history of Britain and France in the nineteenth century, a period of rapid change when people were calling into question old certainties and many new modes of thought and behaviour were emerging. My research focuses on the history of education and the history of childhood, and on the history of social mobility. Studying childhood and the history of education uncovers the roots of modern ideas about individual development and the importance of formal schooling. Examining the history of social mobility reveals some of the concrete ways in which long-standing ideas about the individual’s place in society were being challenged in this period.

I studied history as an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and did my doctoral work on the history of women’s education in England and France at the Sorbonne (Paris I) and Clare Hall, Cambridge. I first came to Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow of Merton College and have been Fellow, Tutor and University Lecturer in Modern History at Exeter since 2006.

Teaching and Supervision Interests

I teach the core undergraduate papers on nineteenth and twentieth-century British and European history, the Foreign Text paper on Tocqueville, and a new Special Subject on Growing up in the middle class family. I am interested in supervising undergraduate and graduate research on the social and cultural history of Britain and France in the nineteenth century, the history of women, modern gender history, and the history of childhood and education; I am particularly keen to work with students who wish to undertake comparative research.

Publications

• Faith and Religion’ in C. Heywood (ed.) The age of empire, 1800-1900, vol. 5 of The cultural history of childhood and the family (series eds.), James Marten & Elizabeth Foyster (2010)
• ‘De la femme aux individus: l’histoire du genre en Grande Bretagne, des années 1960 à nos jours’ Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, (2008), 37, 55-69
• Educating women: schooling and identity in England and France, 1800-1867. (Oxford, 2007)
• 'Educational homes and Barrack-like schools: Cross-Channel perspectives on secondary education for boys in mid-nineteenth century England and France', Educational policy borrowing: Historical perspectives, Oxford Studies in Comparative Education (ed. D Phillips, K Ochs), Vol 14-2 (2004) pp. 89-108
• 'Les murs de la pension., The school community in French and English boarding schools for girls, 1810-1867',Paedagogica Historica, Vol 40 (2004) pp. 107-121
• 'The development of teaching as a profession for women before 1870, The Historical Journal'. Vol 44-4 (2001) pp. 963-988