Tools: Biographies

Joshua Callaway

Mountains

Joshua Callaway is currently a Second-Year student at the University of Warwick, studying History with Italian.

Rachel Carter

Rachel Carter is an undergraduate reading history at Bath Spa University. Prior to this she spent eight years working as a Special Needs Teaching Assistant. She has three children.
Academic interests: history from below, eighteenth and nineteenth century literature.

Dr John Davies

John Davies recently retired as county archivist for Carmarthenshire, south Wales. He gained a Ph.D from Swansea University, The Cawdor estate in south-west Wales. in 2009, a revised version of which is to be published in 2016. Last year John had published a volume of eighteenth century political correspondence - those of John Campbell MP for Pembrokeshire - as part of the Parliamentary texts and studies series.
Academic interests: Eighteenth century politics.

Jonathan Dent

Jonathan Dent has an MA in Modern History. He is interested in learning to decipher seventeenth century script and in contributing to an impressive project to make MarineLives more generally accessible to the wider public.

Sara Fox

Sara Fox is a freelance historic researcher on houses, gardens and people. She studied English at Sunderland Polytechnic and has an MBA Tourism Management and an MA Landscape Management and Environmental Archaeology from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She has a background in horticulture and ran a nursery specialising in old fashioned plants. She has managed European funded business support projects in South West Wales for the Welsh College of Horticulture and Lampeter University. More recently she led a volunteer local history project on the farms and field names of the valley where she lives.

Likes – her husband Tom and children Lily (escaped to Uni in London) and Patrick still serving time at home with parents until 18. Reading old local history and topographical books. Taking cuttings sowing seeds. Talking.

Dislikes – austerity, cuts, local councils and politicians.

Languages – poor French and German and lots of Welsh vocabulary.

Academic interests – The history of the Middleton Hall Estate in Carmarthenshire, now The National Botanic Garden of Wales. Writing about Thomas Hornor the topographical painter and panoramist in Wales.

Tweets @HouseHistorian1

Steve Garnett

Steve Garnett is an independent researcher whose primary interest is the growth of early modern English power in the Mediterranean. He is currently writing a book on English Tangier, 1661-1684. In 2018, he will complete his transcriptions of the documents relating to Ottoman Algiers, 1595-1714, in the State Papers 71 (Barbary States). Steve teaches History at an all boys' secondary modern in Kent and when time and tide allow, sails his Wayfarer dinghy 'The Tommy P' on the River Thames.

Academic interests: The English Mediterranean Experience

Tweets @statepapers71

Colin Greenstreet

Colin Greenstreet and Bron (a Hungarian vizsla)

Colin Greenstreet is co-founder and co-director of the MarineLives project. He studied human sciences, and philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, and was the recipient of a Kennedy scholarship for study at Harvard Business School. His career has been spent in finance, consulting, pharmaceutical research and development, and as an entrepreneur.

Likes: Mountains, languages, travel, and dogs (plus wife, Yerevag; elder daughter and musician, Rebecca; and younger daughter and aspiring neuroscientist, Francesca)

Dislikes: Broccoli

Languages: English, German, indifferent French, staggers through Dutch with a dictionary and a glass of wine

Academic interests: Editing the private papers of Sir George Oxenden (1620-1669); writing an academic dual biography of Sir George Oxenden and his elder sister and commercial agent, Elizabeth Dallison. For papers, seminar and conference presentations see his academia.edu page

Tweets at at @marinelivesorg.

Dr Philip Hnatkovich

Philip Hnatkovich is a Co-Director of the MarineLives project. He received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 2014. He is a historian of the British and French Atlantics, with interests in early modern maritime networks, cultural geography, and transnational communities. His doctoral thesis ("The Atlantic Gate: The Anglo-Huguenot Channel Community, 1558-1685") examines Anglo-French mercantile networks in English Channel ports during the French Wars of Religion, when a militant alignment of Huguenot and Elizabethan elites oversaw a decades-long collaboration in privateering and experimental transatlantic plantation ventures. He argues that the maritime society of the Channel region produced merchant capital, maritime expertise, and formative models for northern trade and colonial settlement in the Americas.

He resides in Pittsburgh, where he spends his spare time dabbling in local politics, perfecting his barbecue technique, riding his bike, and building blanket forts with his daughter.

Languages: English, French, some bits of Latin.

Tweets occasionally @_beneze_

Ross Keel

Ross Keel at a wedding

Ross Keel is a second year undergraduate at Bath Spa University, studying history. He was born in Salisbury, in Wiltshire, where he lived for eighteen years before moving to Bath for university. Ross has held a keen interest in history since an early age and has visited local heritage sites such as Old Sarum castle, Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. This interest has continued throughout his life, and has helped to shape his aspirations for the future, as he hopes to write, research and create historical documentaries and books.

Historical interests: Early modern England and also 20th century Europe.
Other Interests: Watching football, jogging (well, plodding...) and reading a wide variety of books.

Ross tweets very rarely from @Ross14Keel

Sara J Kerr

Sara J Kerr is a PhD student in Digital Humanities and English and a John and Pat Hume Scholar at Maynooth University in Ireland. She has a BA in Ancient History and English from Queen's University, Belfast and an MA in Education from Edge Hill University.

Prior to returning to full time study, Sara taught English, Media Studies and Film Studies at several schools in the UK.

Academic Interests: Early Nineteenth Century literature, in particular Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and Sydney, Lady Morgan; R programming.

Tweets at at @data_fiend.

Grace Mallon

Grace Mallon is an undergraduate reading History at University College, Oxford. Her studies are currently focused on 20th-century Germany, but a recent foray into colonial American history has awakened an interest in the workings of the early British empire. Alongside English, she reads German, French and some Latin. In her spare time she plays the piano and sings in her college choir.

Shavana Musa

Shavana Musa is a doctoral researcher and lecturer at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She will be completing her PhD in 2015, which investigates the right to reparation for the war victim from the middle of the seventeenth century until the present day. She teaches courses on international legal history and world legal systems.

Academic interests: History of international law; international humanitarian law; war and peace; maritime law and history; foreign policy; democracy; constitutional legal history.

Nga Phan-Bellis

Nga Phan-Bellis is a PhD candidate and Graduate teaching assistant in Legal History at University Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas (Paris, France). Her PhD thesis deals with French Securities Law, from the 16th century to the French Civil Code of 1804. Before digging in to Legal History, she studied Private Law at the same university.

Languages: Fluent English, French, Vietnamese. Intermediate Spanish and Persian. Notions of Latin.

Academic interests: early modern economic history in Western Europe, ancient history with a particular interest in Mesopotamia, digital humanities.

You can find more details on linkedin or read her tweets at @NgaPhB.

Jo Pugh

Jo Pugh is a PhD student at the University of York, studying information seeking in archival collections. His previous role was in Education & Outreach at the National Archives.

On Twitter @mentionthewar.

Benjamin Redding

Dr Benjamin Redding

Benjamin Redding recently completed his PhD in History. His main research interests focus on early modern European naval history and its relationship to broader political and cultural trends. His PhD was titled 'Divided by La Manche: Naval Enterprise and Maritime Revolution in England and France, 1545-1642'. His current research and publications look at the international influences that shaped the early modern English navy. Benjamin is co-ordinator of the Warwick programme.

Tweets @BenjaminRedding.

Mia Ridge

Mia Ridge recently completed a PhD in Digital History. She spent much of that time exploring different crowdsourcing projects and is glad to finally have enough time to take part in Marine Lives.

Tilly Smith

Tilly Smith currently a second year History student at the University of Warwick.

Oliver Tanner

Oliver Tanner and girlfriend, Abby

Oliver Tanner is a second year history student at Bath Spa University. When not at university he is a part time chef, amateur chess player and keen cyclist.
After leaving school Oliver took a year out to travel around the world - his experiences traveling include working as a confectioner in Israel, on a coffee plantation in Tanzania, and catching stray dogs in India and vaccinating them against rabies. Throughout this year Oliver developed a keen interest in social history, which he is following up at university.

Brodie Waddell

Brodie Waddell is a lecturer in early modern history at Birkbeck, University of London. I'm primarily interested in the economy and society in seventeenth-century England. You can find more about my research and publications on my staff profile and my academia.edu page (which includes pdfs of some of my articles). I'm co-founder of the many-headed monster, a history blog, and I tweet at @Brodie_Waddell. I live in Cambridge with my wife and three-year-old son, so spend most of my spare time building strange lego structures or playing at the park.

Rebecca Want

Rebecca Want is currently in her final year, reading History at the University of Warwick.

Dominic Webb

Dominic Webb is a second year student at Warwick University, currently studying History with Italian.

Jill Wilcox

Jill Wilcox is co-founder and co-director of the MarineLives project. Jill's passion for family history led her to complete a history degree at the University of Hertfordshire as a mature student. Subsequently, she has spent sixteen years as a comprehensive teacher and head of department. She completed a MEd in leading teaching and learning at the University of Cambridge in 2011. Throughout her career Jill has used technology to engage and assist her students in their learning.

Samuel Watson

Sam Watson is a second year student at Bath Spa University. He lives in Kent when he is not in Bath at University. He studied Ancient History at A level and has developed an interest in a very wide range of different topics throughout history.

Likes: Travelling, Adventure, Bear Grylls, Football (Chelsea) and trying new things.

Dislikes: Cold weather.