Dr Claire Phillips

Professional biography

I am a historian of early modern and modern British History. I completed my PhD at the University of Leeds in 2017 with a thesis entitled 'The Care of Sick Children in Eighteenth-Century England'. I have been teaching at the Open University since 2010 and am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

Research interests

I have wide ranging research interests in early modern and modern childhood and youth, gender and the family, and welfare history. I am currently writing my first book examining the London Foundling Hospital in the nineteenth century. I have also received funding from the Women's History Network Early Career Fellowship and the Royal Historical Society for my research on children in Welsh Workhouses, c. 1880-1930; and from Women's History Scotland for my work on Children's Residential Care in Scotland, 1834-1920. 

Teaching interests

I teach on the following modules: A223: Early Modern Europe: Society and Culture, 1500-1789; A225: The British Isles and the Modern World, 1789-1914; A883 MA History Part 1; A884 MA History Part 2.

Publications

‘Working Class Medical Care for Children in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Northern England’, Doing Working-Class History: Research, Heritage, and Engagement, ed. by Oliver Betts, Laura Harrison and Laura Christine Price (London: Routledge, 2025), pp. 149–161

‘“There was no goodnight hug or kiss”: The Foundling Hospital and the Feeling of Family, 1900–1950’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 17:3 (2024), 389–411

‘“So they may be usefull to themselves”: Work and Apprenticeship in the Ackworth branch Foundling Hospital, 1757–1773’, Family & Community History, 25:3 (2022), 219–233

‘Child Abandonment in England: The Case of the London Foundling Hospital, 1741–1834’, Genealogy, 3:35 (2019)

‘The Education of Children in the London Foundling Hospital, c. 1800–1825’, Childhood in the Past, 11:1 (2018), 8–20

‘The Treatment of Whooping Cough in Eighteenth-Century England’, Ex Historia, 8 (2016), 1–33