Ms Kerry-Louise Apps

Kerry Apps was a doctoral researcher within FASS. Her successfully defended doctoral project examined the significance of global objects, textiles, and commodities at the Restoration court through the lens of the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale and their home, Ham House. On a day-to-day basis, Kerry trawled through the Restoration-era inventories collated for the Duchess, tracing the amount of nutmeg, sugar, or cinnamon consumed, reading bills and letters documenting the Duke’s love of Virginia tobacco, or staring intently at cabinets of glimmering Japanese lacquer, polychromatic Chinese screens, and some of the earliest surviving examples of British chinoiserie. This PhD project was funded by the AHRC and completed as a CDA between the OU and the National Trust. Kerry's PhD built on an MPhil and undergraduate degree focused on the social, global, and colonial histories of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Before embarking on an MPhil at Cambridge in 2021 and her PhD in 2022, Kerry taught secondary history in South London. During her teaching career, Kerry published numerous journal articles on teaching history and wrote for BBC Bitesize, BBC History Extra, Hodder Education, and the DfE.