Mrs Holly Hiscox

Holly is currently undertaking a PhD entitled ‘Public schools, empire and the City of London, c.1828-1900: Rugby School and the making of an imperial financial elite.’ The significant presence of public school alumni in the City during the nineteenth century (and beyond) has been acknowledged, but few studies have examined these connections and their associated networks in detail. This project seeks to address this absence in the scholarship, taking Rugby as the principal site of investigation for reconstructing the formation, functioning and legacy of these networks, both in Britain and across the empire. The significance of the project lies in its potential to break new ground in our understanding of British elites, imperial finance and wealth extraction, and in particular how these were embedded in a new culture of elite pedagogy, corporate socialisation and financial specialisation.

Holly's research is funded by an AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Programme Studentship in partnership with Rugby School’s Schools of Empire: Class, race, and colonialism, c.1750-1945 research project. Before beginning her PhD, Holly received a BA in Modern History and Politics from the University of Oxford, an MA in History from Oxford Brookes University, an MSc in Learning and Teaching from the University of Oxford, and spent several years working in secondary education.