University of Hertfordshire

Leanne is a Senior Lecturer in History, specialising in women's and gender history, across the long eighteenth-century. She was previously a Research Fellow in Intangible Cultural Heritage in the History Group (2017-19). Leanne is a historian of women, gender and the family, and her research interests include the family and its relationships, the life-cycle, religion (with an emphasis on Presbyterianism and Dissenting traditions) and migration. 

Current Project:

Sexuality & Social Control: Irish Presbyterians in the Atlantic World, 1717-1830.

This project explores the relationship between sexuality, religion and migration. It focuses on Presbyterians and investigates the ways that Presbyterian sexuality was policed in Ireland and North America, between the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries. 

Salacious stories of stolen trysts in backrooms, fields and forests; misbehaving ministers riding on horseback, seducing the wives of their church members; and promiscuous Presbyterian youths sneaking around behind the backs of their elders form the basis of this research. What did Presbyterian women and men in past centuries get up to under the sheets? At what point did sexual activity become illicit? How different were Presbyterian communities in Ireland and North America? In tracing this aspect of Presbyterian life, this project asks what we can learn about the family by placing sex and sexuality at the core of our research.

This project is funded by a number of awarding bodies, including:

• British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant Scheme
• Research Fellowship from the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia
• Women's History Association of Ireland, Anna Parnell Travel Grant

Follow the project on Twitter for tales of Presbyterian Sex, Scandal & Sin @PPresbyterians

Promiscuous Presbyterians has been touring around via zoom this past year. You can watch Leanne's popular public history talk for the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland here or listen to her recent talk at the Early Modern History Seminar at Trinity College, Dublin on Spotify podcasts here

Previous Projects:

Leanne has published widely on the family, sex and marriage in Ireland. She has published in Analecta Hibernica, Women's History Review, Journal of Family History, Irish Economic and Social History, and Irish Historical Studies.  She is currently the co-Director of the Perceptions of Pregnancy Researchers' network with Dr. Jennifer Evans.

Leanne completed her Ph.D. at Queen's University, Belfast in 2015, entitled 'Love, Life and the Family in the Ulster Presbyterian community, 1780-1844'. Before joining the University of Hertfordshire, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher on an AHRC-funded project entitled 'Bad Bridget: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918', held jointly between Ulster University and Queen's University, Belfast.