Rate My Professor Julie-Marie Strange

Professor Julie-Marie Strange serves as Professor of Modern British History and Head of Department in the Department of History at Durham University, where she joined in October 2019. Prior to this, she was at the University of Manchester from 2003 and had a brief position at Birkbeck, University of London. She completed her PhD at the University of Liverpool between 1996 and 2000. Strange is an Associate Fellow in Durham's Institute of Advanced Study and serves on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Death and Life Studies. Her research focuses on class, emotion, material culture, gender and sexuality, animals and dogs, Victorian society, death and grief, pet bereavement, human experiences of pet loss, public pet cemeteries, and pets in family life. She holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for the project ‘Love in the Time of Capitalism: Emotion and the Making of the Working Class, 1848-1914’, commencing in October 2020 for three years.

Strange has produced a substantial body of scholarly work that illuminates emotional and social dynamics in modern Britain. Her monographs include Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Husbands and Fathers (Routledge, 2013). She co-authored The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) with Michael Worboys and Neil Pemberton, The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870-1912 (Bloomsbury, 2018) with Sarah Roddy and Bertrand Taithe, and Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life (Reaktion Books, 2023) with Jane Hamlett. Additionally, she contributed to British Family Life, 1780–1914, Volume 5 (Routledge, 2013). Her peer-reviewed articles, published in journals such as Journal of British Studies, The Historical Journal, Social History of Medicine, and Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, explore themes like fatherhood in working-class homes, humanitarian bureaucracy, pets and class, financial services in charity, and menstrual etiquette. Notable publications include 'Fatherhood, providing and attachment in late-Victorian and Edwardian working-class families' (The Historical Journal, 2012), 'When John met Benny: class, pets and family life in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain' (The History of the Family, 2021), and 'Banking for Jesus: Financial Services, Charity, and an Ethical Economy in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain' (2022). Through these contributions, Strange has advanced understandings of everyday emotional experiences and material practices in working-class history.