Professor Julia Laite

Overview

Biography

Dr. Julia Laite joined Birkbeck in 2010 after holding postdoctoral fellowships at Memorial University of Newfoundland and McGill University, Canada. Her research examines the history of migration, gender, sex and crime, as well as family history, creative history and public history. She is the author of the Disappearance of Lydia Harvey (2021), Wolfenden's Women (2020), and Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens (2012), and was principal investigator of the AHRC-funded project Trafficking Past.  Her current work examines critical family history, settler colonialism and migration, and she currently holds an ISRF Mid-Career Fellowship to pursue a new book project. 

Julia convenes the MA in Public Histories, and the MA/MSc in Gender and Sexuality. She is part of the editorial collective of History Workshop Journal and is on the advisory board for History Workshop Online. 

Highlights

• Author of
  
  The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice (Profile, 2021)

  with Samantha Caslin, Wolfenden's Women: Prostitution in Post-War Britain (Palgrave, 2021)

  Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (Palgrave, 2012)

  
  

Office hours

Office hours by appointment

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Cambridge, 2009
• MPhil, University of Cambridge, 2003
• BA History (Hons), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2002

Administrative responsibilities

• Convenor, MA Public Histories
• Convenor, MA/MSc Gender and Sexuality

Professional memberships

• Editor, History Workshop Journal

• Fellow, Royal Historical Society

Research

Research interests

• History of migration and settler colonialism
• Women's and Gender history
• Family history, creative history, storytelling and public history
• History of Sex, Sexuality and Sexual Labour

Research overview

Julia Laite's is a historian and teller of stories. Her research interests include the history of settler colonialism, family history, migration, women and gender, crime and criminal justice, sex and sexual labour, narrative and creative history. Her new research project examines settler colonialism, place-making, family history, and storytelling in her home of Newfoundland. She writes about historiography and historical methodology, especially microhistory, digital methodologies, and history from below.

Her most recent book, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey (Profile, April 2021) won the Crime Writer's Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction, and the Bert Roth award for Labour History. It is a global microhistory of a case of trafficking in 1910, which reconstructs a multi-vocal story of aspiration and exploitation in the early twentieth century world. 

Her first book, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, examined the criminalization of prostitution in nineteenth and twentieth century London, and she has recently co-authored with Samantha Caslin a critical source edition of the Wolfenden report minutes of evidence, Wolfenden's Women. She was the principal investigator of the AHRC-funded project Trafficking Past, with co-investigator Philippa Hetherington, which has built an international network of scholars researching the history of trafficking, smuggling, and illicit migration in gendered and historical perspective.  She has guest edited a special issue of the Journal of Women's History on this topic with Dr Philippa Hetherington.

Books

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: One trial, six lives and the dawn of the twentieth century (April, 2021) 

Co-authored with Samantha Caslin, Wolfenden’s Women:  Prostitution in Post-War Britain  (submitting manuscript to Palgrave in January, 2019)

Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

 

Journal Articles
 

‘Schooners and schoonermen, my grandfather and me’, History Workshop Journal (expected publication autumn 2019)

‘The Emmet’s Inch: ‘Small’ History in a Digital Age’, Journal of Social History (expected publication 2019)

 ‘Prostitution and Work’, Journal of Women’s History Roundtable, Journal of Women’s History, (2018)

‘Traffickers and Pimps in the Era of White Slavery’, Past & Present, Volume 237, Issue 1, 1 November 2017, Pages 237–269

‘Between Scylla and Charybdis:  Women’s Labour Migration and Sex Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century,’ International Review of Social History Volume 62, Issue 1 April 2017, pp. 37-65

‘Justifiable Sensationalism: Newspapers, Public Opinion, and Official Policy about Commercial Sex in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Media History 20, 2 (2015) 126-145

‘Immoral Traffic: Sex, Mobility, Labour and the Lorry Girl in early Twentieth Century Britain’ Journal of British Studies 52, 3 (2013) 693-721

‘Historical Perspectives on Mining, Industrial Development, and Prostitution,’ Historical Journal 52, 3 (2009) 739-761

‘Taking Nellie Johnson’s Fingerprints: Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early Twentieth Century London,’ History Workshop Journal 65, 1 (2008) 96-116

‘The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, Abolitionism, and Prostitution Law in Britain,’ Women’s History Review 17, 2 (2008) 207-223

 

Book Chapters
‘London’, in Selling Sex in World Cities (London: Berg, 2018)

 Other selected publications

‘Know your history?  From Victorians to Housewives, Five Myths Expos

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

8

Dr. Laite supervises doctoral projects related to migration law and policy in modern british history, sex and gender in the modern British world, sexual and intimate labour, and modern British social and cultural history.  She also supervises projects that are methodologically interested in uncovering marginal experiences and voices, and using creative and socially engaged research methods.

Current doctoral researchers

• ALLISON MCKIBBAN

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Jan 2023 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  An Era of Violence Against Native Women: Uncovering Colonial Violence in the U.S. Violence Against Women Act

  Description:

  The 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was the first U.S. federal recognition of disproportionate violence against Native women. Despite 27 years of legislated ‘solutions’, the violence persists, as nearly 85 percent of Native women experience sexual violence in their lifetime. My project challenges the assumption that the ‘problem’ the VAWA aims to ‘solve’ is obvious. Using poststructuralist policy studies and indigenous feminisms, I employ Carol Bacchi’s discursive policy analysis tool—What’s the Problem Represented to Be—to elucidate how the VAWA (re)created, (re)constituted, and (re)shaped the very ‘problem’ it claims to address, over three decades. My research reveals the problematizations of Native women in the VAWA, the underlying logics and genealogies, the silences and contestations, and their lived effects. It works to decolonise U.S. policy through challenging how federal discourse creates what we ‘know’ about Native communities and violence against Native women.

• LOLA DICKINSON

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2022 onwards

• NICOLA LAMBERT

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2018 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Fallen Men? Representations and Experiences of Seducers of Fallen Women in Victorian Britain

• PETER WOOD

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2020 onwards

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• ANNALISA MARTIN

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2018

  Title of thesis:

  Managing Commercial Sex in West Germany, 1950s-1980s

  Awarded:

  2022

Publications

Business and community

Media

I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:

• Prostitution and Trafficking
• Migration history
• Public history and family history

Outreach

Academic Lead, North Kensington Archive and Heritage Project, Heritage Lottery Funded project documenting the community history of those affected by the Grenfell Tower Fire