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Dr Kirsten James
Lecturer in History
- Phone
- +44 (0)1473339156
- k.james7@uos.ac.uk
- School/Directorate
- School of Social Sciences and Humanities
Dr Kirsten James is an historian of early modern France and Britain whose research spans cultural, social, business, urban, and medical subjects. She is currently completing her first monograph, Selling Scent: the Rise of the Perfumery Trade, in which she traces how eighteenth-century medical discourse vilified stench, reduced demand for strong-smelling perfumes burned to mask undesirable smells, and encouraged architects and administrators to rethink urban spaces. Her second-book project will investigate the rise of urban public baths in France, England, and their colonies during the eighteenth century, which remains a neglected subject in the scholarship on the ‘consumer revolution’. The project will document and map bathing establishments in bath houses and river barges; it will reconstruct their finances and the services they provided for customers; and it will argue that the increased supply of and demand for urban baths partly resulted in a shift in perceptions about bodily hygiene and the nature of skin.
Before her appointment at the University of Suffolk, Dr James was Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. She holds degrees from the University of Toronto (PhD, Tor); University of Cambridge (MPhil, Cantab); King’s College and Dalhousie University (BA hons, Vind). She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
Dr James has a wide-ranging teaching portfolio that reflects the interdisciplinarity of her research interests. She has extensive experience teaching at several universities in Canada and Britain. She previously taught year-long ‘special subjects’ on both the ‘French Revolution, 1789-1804’ and the ‘Age of Elizabeth I’.
Dr James currently teaches the following modules:
BA
Growing Pains from Medieval to Early-Modern: Society and Culture from the Normans to the Tudors
Encounters, Exchange and the making of Colonial Worlds since 1492
‘The civet trade in eighteenth-century London’, The Recipes Project, May 2019. Requested for the series ‘Perfume’ – https://recipes.hypotheses.org/15008
‘What was perfume in the eighteenth century?’, The Recipes Project, December 2014. Requested for the series ‘Beauty Recipes’ - https://recipes.hypotheses.org/4734
‘Marketing strategies in eighteenth-century France and England: the example of the perfumer’, Graduate Seminar in History, 1680–1850, Oxford, February 2020.
‘Inside the Perfumer’s Boutique in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Paris’, Society for French Historical Studies Conference: Spectacle and Society, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, March 2016. Presented for the roundtable session ‘Consumer Cultures and Material Goods in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century France’. Recorded and distributed for H-France Salon, vol. 8 (2016), Issue 3, #2: https://www.h-france.net/Salon/Volume8.html
‘The rise of the British perfumer: creating British scents in eighteenth-century London’, North East Conference on British Studies, University of Ottawa, October 2015. Given as part of the panel ‘Perfuming London from 1600 to 1918’.
Dr James is managing editor for the Journal of Global History.