The project is led by Leanne McCormick (UU) Principal Investigator and Elaine Farrell (QUB) Co-Investigator. In year 2, Leanne Calvert worked as a post-doctoral research fellow. ‘Bad Bridget’ was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Leanne read history at University of Cambridge where she also completed a PGCE in History. She taught history at schools in India and Edinburgh before completing a PhD at the University of Ulster. She held a post-doctoral position in the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI) before being appointed to her position as Lecturer in Modern Irish Social History in 2009. She is also Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine (CHOMI) at Ulster University.
Elaine Farrell is a graduate of University College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast. She was an Irish Research Council Post-doctoral Fellow at University College Dublin, before joining Queen’s as a permanent lecturer in 2012. She is now Senior Lecturer in Irish Social History. Her first monograph, ‘A most diabolical deed’: infanticide and Irish society (Manchester, 2013), won the National University of Ireland Publication Prize in Irish History. Her second monograph was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, Women, crime and punishment in Ireland: Life in the nineteenth-century convict prison. She has also published on gender, childhood and crime history in Social History; Women’s History Review; Irish Economic and Social History; Cultural and Social History; Journal of Social History and Irish Archives.
Leanne received her PhD from Queen’s University, Belfast, in 2015. Her thesis, which was entitled ‘Love, life and the family in the Ulster Presbyterian community, 1780-1844’ charted the experiences of the Presbyterian family from the cradle to the grave. Five main areas were examined: Courtship, Marriage, Parenthood, Youth and Adolescence, and Widowhood. Aspects of her PhD has been published in Women’s History Review, Analecta Hibernica and Journal of Family History.
After leaving the Bad Bridget Team, Leanne took up a Research Fellowship at the University of Hertfordshire, where she is currently a Lecturer in History. Her current project, Sexuality and Social Control: Irish Presbyterians in the Atlantic World, 1717-1830 is funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grants Award. Leanne serves as the Newsletter Editor and Web Co-Ordinator of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History, and is the Co-Director of the Perceptions of Pregnancy Research Network. You can read more about Leanne’s work subsequent to the Bad Bridget project here.
Bad Bridget® : Criminal and deviant Irish women in North America, 1838-1918 