Dr Jane Hamlett

My research interests focus on society and culture in modern Britain, the history of women and gender, the history of intimacy and emotion, and material and visual culture.

My first book explored the material culture of the middle-class home. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850-1910 tells the story of nineteenth and early twentieth century middle-class families by exploring the domestic spaces they inhabited and the material goods they prized. The book sheds new light on aspects of family life including love, marriage, sex, childhood and death. Relations between husband and wife were fashioned by drawing-room politeness, and fastidious sexuality mediated in the marital bedroom. The nursery distanced parent and child, glamorising parents and sometimes embittering children. Material Relations has been reviewed in a range of publications including Times Higher Education.

My research also appeared in 'Choosing the Chintz: Men, Women and Furnishing the Home from 1850 to the Present,' a special exhibition at the Geffrye Museum from November 2008 to February 2009.

I recently led an ESRC-funded project, ‘At Home in the Institution,’ looking at the impact of the design, decoration and furnishing of residential institutional spaces on the experiences of their inmates. The project focuses on three case studies: lunatic asylums (as they were known to contemporaries), schools for middle-class children, and common and charitable lodging houses. I am currently editing a collection of essays from this project, Residential Institutions in Britain 1725-1970 with Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston, and I am writing a new book, At Home in the Institution: Inside Lunatic Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England.

I am also interested in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century domestic and family photography, and am developing a new project 'Framing Intimacy' that looks closely at the expression of emotional life in visual culture, and its relationship with changing technologies.