Centre for Gender History

Rebecca is a historian of gender and law in early modern Scotland. She completed her PhD in the Centre for Gender History at the University of Glasgow in 2019. Her thesis, undertaken in conjunction with the UK-wide Arts and Humanities Council research network ‘Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice: Britain and Ireland, 1100-1750’, examined married women’s property rights and access to justice in seventeenth-century Glasgow. Her thesis examined the varying agency – from utter subservience to husbands to independent initiators of lawsuits – of married women under the law in legal contracts and actions that reflected their concerns over property. In 2019 she was appointed as an Economic History Society Power Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London. As an EHS Fellow she broadened the research base of her thesis in terms of period and places studies, paying close attention to regional, chronological, and jurisdictional specifics. In 2020 she was appointed as an Economic and Social Research Council Fellow in the School of Law at the University of Glasgow. Under the mentorship of Professor Jane Mair, her new postdoctoral project - entitled ‘Women, Marriage and Law in Scotland: Historical and Legal Perspectives’ - involves working with historians, policymakers and legal practitioners interested in the particularities of women’s access to law in Scotland. Rebecca is a steering committee member of Women’s History Scotland and co-founded a research bursary in 2018 to promote further research into Scottish women’s history. She was awarded the inaugural Alasdair Ross Research Prize by the Scottish History Society in 2019. She is a postdoctoral representative on the Gender Equality Committee in the School of Humanities and is currently assisting the School in applying for the Athena SWAN Silver Award. She was elected as an Early Career Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2020. 

First published: 16 February 2021