Faith in the Town

Hannah Barker is Professor of British History at the University of Manchester. She is a historian of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century northern England. Her recent research has explored issues of gender, work, and faith in towns and her publications in this field include The Business of Women (OUP, 2006), 'Soul, purse and family: middling and lower-class masculinity in eighteenth-century Manchester', Social History (2008), Family and Business During the Industrial Revolution (OUP, 2017) which won the Social History Society book of the year, and 'A devout and commercial people' in Revisiting the Polite and Commercial People (OUP, 2019). Carys Brown is Head of Academic, Personal, and Professional Development at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she was previously a Research Fellow. Prior to this, she was a Research Associate on the 'Faith in the Town' project. Her primary research interests are in the social, cultural, and religious history of late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain, with a particular focus on religious coexistence and on the history of children. Her monograph, Friends, Neighbours, Sinners: Religious Difference and English Society, 1689-1750 was published in 2022. Kate Gibson is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester. She was previously a Research Associate on the 'Faith in the Town' project. She is a social historian of eighteenth-century Britain, with a particular interest in the reproduction of inequality through family relationships. Her monograph, Illegitimacy, Family and Stigma in England, 1660-1834 was published by OUP in 2022. She is currently working on the history of fostering and adoption in Britain from 1700 to 1839. Jeremy Gregory is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Faculty of Arts and Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Nottingham. His research and publications have shaped and contributed to the debates concerning the role of the Church of England in particular, and religion in general, in English social, cultural, political, and intellectual history from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. His edited book, Manchester Cathedral: A History of the Collegiate Church and Cathedral, 1421 to the Present, was published in 2021. He edited The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume II Establishment and Empire, 1662-1829 (OUP, 2017; paperback 2019).