Selected published pieces
“Swinging boats, merry-go-rounds, cocoa nut shies and our old friend Mr Punch”.
My latest article investigates the variety of leisure activities hosted by the churches of East Oxford, a growing working-class suburb, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Olivia Robinson (2023) ‘Pious Pleasure? Church-Based Leisure in a Working-Class Community, East Oxford 1870–1914’, Cultural and Social History, DOI: 10.1080/14780038.2023.2237731
Travelling Ayahs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Here I investigate the way in which Indian nannies, hired to look after British children on sea voyages back and forth from South Asia and England, navigated their roles and the spaces they inhabited.
O. Robinson (2018) ‘Travelling Ayahs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Global Networks and Mobilization of Agency’, History Workshop Journal, Volume 86, 44–66, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dby016
Tracing the journey from paper to digital
Co-written with my Link-Lives colleagues, we explore the multiple steps that historical records pass through, from their creation to becoming ‘data’.
Robinson O., Thomsen, A., Mathiesen, N. and Barbara Revuelta-Eugercios, B. (2023) “Transforming archival records into Historical Big Data: human and computer processes in the Link-Lives project”, in Bak, G., Paasch, M. and Rostgaard, M. (eds), Standards, Collaboration and Digital Archiving: Born Digital Archiving in the Nordic Countries (Routledge, UK).
Forthcoming / in press
Robinson, O. “Transforming legacies: historical data dynamics in the digital age of family history research” in Sara Georgini (ed) Oxford Handbook of Family History and Genealogy (New York, Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2024)
Revuelta-Eugercios, B., Thomsen, A., Robinson, O., Reguant, R., Mathiesen, N., Løkke, A. “Linked historical records as training data for 19th century Denmark: methods to create high quality manually historical records for machine learning” (forthcoming 2024)
Mathiesen, N., Thomsen, A., Robinson, O., Reguant, R., Revuelta-Eugercios, B. “Linking 19th century Danish censuses through automatic methods: rule based and machine learning algorithms” (forthcoming 2024)
DPhil History, Oxford University
“Crossing the Channel to seek their future”: foreign female domestic servants in London 1881-1939
My PhD charts the employment and migration experiences of foreign female domestic servants in Britain, an amalgamation of some of the most marginalised groups in this period: working class ‘alien’ women. I’m fascinated by historical ‘outsiders’ such as these. Living at the margins of our society they are overlooked and written out of accounts of the past.
While travel in 19th century was increasingly accessible to ordinary people, it was still a big deal to travel alone as a woman and to leave the safety of home and family to find work – not just in a far-off city but in a different country altogether. ‘My’ domestic servants came from all over the world. I’ve found Chinese, Turkish, Dutch, Japanese and Portuguese housekeepers, parlourmaids and children’s nurses living all over the country. Who were they and why did they come? How were they treated once they arrived and what happened to them once they left service?
Through themes of transnationalism, agency and otherness, I explore how their experiences form the historical context for today’s global domestic service industry, so often considered a recent phenomenon.
Completion year
2020
Funders
AHRC and Kellogg College
Dr. Olivia Robinson 