Hannah is an established academic historian and expert in eighteenth-century British history.
ACADEMIC, AUTHOR AND PUBLIC SPEAKER
After completing a PhD in 2004 she pursued a successful academic career at the Universities of Oxford and York, winning major fellowships and grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust to support her research. Since 2023, Hannah has moved to full-time writing and consultancy, with an honorary professorship at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Her academic research and previous university-based teaching focuses on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century history, women’s history and the history of the Georgian royal court, constitution and politics. Her scholarship has been published in leading academic journals and her book The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Eighteenth-Century London (2003) examines the emergence of ‘the ton’, the distinctive elite celebrity culture associated with Georgian London. Hannah is currently writing a book about famous eighteenth-century diamonds and their infamous owners for Oxford University Press.
Hannah is a highly experienced lecturer and public speaker, skilled at communicating to a range of audiences from academic settings to specialist and non-specialist public events. She is routinely invited as a keynote or a panel member and is a warm and expert contributor to festivals and events. She is often asked to talk about the representation of history on screen (drawing on her experience as a collaborator to film and TV) and comment on how modern society engages with history, as well as delivering talks and lectures on eighteenth-century histories.
As an ambassador for the Wolfson History Prize (the longest running prize for history books that reach a wide audience), and an advocate of academic collaboration with creative partners, Hannah actively supports the wider communication and dissemination of history beyond universities.
To reach Hannah to discuss a keynote lecture, festival, panel discussion, TV interview or other event please use the contact form
THE BEAU MONDE
Caricatured for extravagance, vanity, glamorous celebrity and, all too often, embroiled in scandal and gossip, 18th-century London's fashionable society had a well-deserved reputation for frivolity. But to be fashionable in 1700s London meant more than simply being well dressed. Fashion denoted membership of a new type of society - the beau monde, a world where status was no longer determined by coronets and countryseats alone but by the more nebulous qualification of metropolitan 'fashion'. Conspicuous consumption and display were crucial; the right address, the right dinner guests, the right possessions, the right jewels, the right seat at the opera.
The Beau Monde leads us on a tour of this exciting new world, from court and parliament to London's parks, pleasure grounds, and private homes. From brash displays of diamond jewellery to the subtle complexities of political intrigue, we see how membership of the new elite was won, maintained - and sometimes lost. On the way, we meet a rich and colourful cast of characters, from the newly ennobled peer learning the ropes and the imposter trying to gain entry by means of clever fakery, to the exile banned for sexual indiscretion.
Above all, as the story unfolds, we learn that being a Fashionable was about far more than simply being 'modish'. By the end of the century, it had become nothing less than the key to power and exclusivity in a changed world.
