Beth JENKINS
Research Fellow 2020 supported by The William Lind Foundation
Beth Jenkins is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Essex, with research interests in the histories of gender, education and professional culture. Her fellowship will be spent looking at the Scottish Business Archive and the University of Glasgow’s institutional archive. This research will feed into two projects: first, her postdoctoral research on gender and professional culture in modern Britain, and, second, a study of working-class women’s experiences of higher education in the early twentieth century.
I’m really looking forward to spending time at the University of Glasgow Library this year and am grateful for the generous support provided by the William Lind Foundation. During the fellowship I will study the extensive records of employers’ associations held in the Scottish Business Archive. The minute books, business papers, miscellaneous records and photographs of these associations will provide a fruitful lens to analyse the gendered nature of business cultures. Building on previous research I have conducted into working-class women graduates in Wales, I also hope to develop a comparative study with Scotland through analysis of the university’s matriculation records and the General Council Registers. This fellowship will allow me to not only incorporate the rich Glaswegian and Scottish experiences into my research projects, but to draw much broader conclusions about the historical development of gendered occupational cultures and access to higher education in modern Britain.
