Lynn Abrams

Lynn Abrams FBA FRHistS FRSE is a historian and Professor of History at the University of Glasgow, and a Fellow of the British Academy (2018^[1]). She is Chair in Modern History at the University of Glasgow, where her research and teaching interests include the history of women and gender relations in Britain, and oral history.^[2]

Lynn Abrams FBA FRHistS FRSE
Born	1960 (age 64–65)
Occupation(s)	Historian and academic
Title	Professor of Modern History
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	Gender history Oral history History of early childhood care and education History of feminism Social history
Institutions	University of East Anglia University of Bristol University of Glasgow

Career

Abrams has published widely in academic journals and edited volumes, and has published five books, including two on oral history theory.^[2]

Between 2010 and 2016, she was co-editor of the journal Gender & History along with Alexandra Shepard and Eleanor Gordon, both also of the University of Glasgow.^[2] She was convenor of Women's History Scotland from 2008 to 2013,^[3] which aims to promote study and research in women's and gender history.

She coordinated the public event Reinventing Scotland's Woollen Traditions in Glasgow in 2012, which explored the history and influence of knitting on Scotland, as well as the impact of it resurgence in popularity on Scotland's creative industries and tourism.^[4]

In 2013, her research study on masculinity in Highland men between 1760 and 1840 was subject to media attention, when it received criticism from Gaelic writer Angus Peter Campbell. Abrams studied the records of courts in Inverness and found a model of "disciplined masculinity" which subsumed a previously more lawless and violent Highland culture. Campbell argued the research was flawed because of the difficulty of understanding Highland society at that time without a knowledge of Gaelic.^[5]

In 2015, Abrams led a research project on the experiences of those who were rehoused in high rise flats in Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s. The Housing, Everyday Life and Wellbeing team aimed to look at social history of public housing in Glasgow, focusing on 20th century social housing such as the Red Road high rise flats, rather than the tenement on which previous research had tended to focus.^[6][7]

In 2017, Abrams joined calls for public memorials to Scottish women accused of and executed for witchcraft between the 16th and 18th centuries, saying it reflected a wider dearth of visible monuments to Scottish women.^[8][9]

In 2018, Abrams was elected a Fellow of the British Academy,^[10][11] in recognition of her contribution to scholarship and research in the humanities.^[12]

Personal life

Callum Brown, a fellow historian at the University of Glasgow, is Abrams's partner.^[13]

Bibliography

• Workers' Culture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (London: Routledge, 1992) ISBN 0415076358
• Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871-1918 (London: Routledge, 1995) ISBN 0415077818
• The Orphan Country: Children of Scotland's Broken Homes from 1845 to the Present Day (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998) ISBN 0859764974
• The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789-1918 (Harlow: Longman, 2002) ISBN 9780582414105
• Myth and Materiality in a Woman's World: Shetland 1800-2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) ISBN 0719065925
• Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010) ISBN 9780415427548
• Feminist Lives: Women, Feelings, and the Self in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) ISBN 0192896997