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Dr Richard Ansell

Positions held:
  • Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
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  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    I am a postdoctoral researcher on the Leverhulme Trust project 'Written Worlds: Non-Elite Writing in 17th-Century England'. More generally, I am interested in the social and cultural history of travel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I grew up in North Yorkshire, studied at Cambridge, Brown and Oxford and have researched and taught at Oxford, York, Leicester and Maynooth in Ireland.

  • Research

    Research

    Research overview

    My work on the Written Worlds project involves finding and analysing non-elite writing relating to travel and encounter.

    I recently published an edition of four travel journals by eighteenth-century domestic servants, Servants Abroad: Travel Journals by British Working People, 1765–1798 (Oxford: British Academy/OUP, 2024), in the British Academy's Records of Social and Economic History series.

    My first monograph, Complete Gentlemen: Educational Travel and Family Strategy, 1650–1750 (Oxford: British Academy/OUP, 2022), was the result of my British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Leicester. It moves beyond worn stereotypes of the 'Grand Tour', relating travel to broader questions of upbringing, identity, social mobility and elite formation.

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • The Voices of the People, 1500-1800 (SC03008S7)