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Staff Profiles

Professor Annie Tindley

Head of School

  • Email: annie.tindley@ncl.ac.uk
  • Telephone: 0191 2085078
  • Address: Room 1.42
    School of History, Classics and Archaeology
    Armstrong Building
    Newcastle University
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

Annie is Professor of British and Irish Rural History and since 2020 the Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. She joined Newcastle in September 2016 and from December 2017-December 2020 was the Consortium Director for the AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (http://www.northernbridge.ac.uk). Annie completed her MA (2001), MSc by Research (2002) and PhD (2006) in History at the University of Edinburgh. She has held posts at the University of Aberdeen, Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Dundee.

Her particular research interests revolve around land issues and rural history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Scottish, Irish, British and imperial contexts. She has published widely on the ways in which landed elites defined and translated their power – territorial, political, social, financial – across their estates, the domestic political world of Westminster, and into the imperial context as governors and legislators. She has also worked extensively with other disciplines, including design, water engineering and visual arts. She champions working outwith the academy in all capacities, including policy work for the Scottish Government and adult and lifelong learning activities and her research impact work has been submitted in both REF2014 and REF2021. In 2015 she established and became the first director of the Centre for Scotland's Land Futures (http://www.scotlandslandfutures.org), an inter-institutional and interdisciplinary research centre, and established an interdisciplinary book series, Scotland's Land, with Edinburgh University Press (https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-scotland-s-land.html). She is a co-editor of the journal Rural History, trustee and vice-chair of the Natural History Society of Northumberland and the Northumberland Archives Trust and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9437-6329 

Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=list_works&hl=en&user=O94thPAAAAAJ 



Research

Annie's particular research interests lie in the history and contemporary legacies all land issues, including landownership, land reform, land use and management. She has worked on the aristocratic and landed classes, landed estates and their management from the mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries in the Scottish, Irish, British and imperial contexts. She has also worked extensively in partnership with community landowners, heritage groups and enterprises across rural Scotland, helping to put their histories in the centre of decision-making for the future (https://www.land-decisions.org/). Annie has also worked on a number of collaborative, interdisciplinary projects with scientists, ecologists water engineers, practising medics and designers, looking at areas as diverse as the impact of river morphology on social history and the history of healthcare provision in the Highlands. She has also written extensively on the nature of design and technology in the nineteenth century, in the British and imperial contexts and is currently working on a UK-wide project on the history of trees and woodlands (https://www.uktreescapes.org/projects/connected-treescapes/).

She has established an interdisciplinary book series, Scotland’s Land, for Edinburgh University Press (https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/books/subjects/scottish-studies) and is is co-editor of the journal Rural History (Cambridge University Press).

Teaching

Annie is an experienced and innovative teacher, dedicated to the principles of research-led teaching, and has a strong track record in developing innovative and interdisciplinary approaches, including blended and distance learning.

Annie teaches and researches on the following key areas, and would be interested to hear from potential doctoral students and fellow academics looking to pursue research on:

  • Aristocratic families and the history of landed estates in Britain and Ireland and the county house
  • Imperial history (Britain, Ireland and the Empire)
  • British and Irish aristocrats in the Empire, c.1790-1945; researching the links between landed estate management, land reform in the international context and imperial governance.
  • Modern Scottish history (1707-1945)
  • Social history of modern Britain and Ireland
  • History of the modern Scottish Highlands (social, economic, political)
  • Agricultural and rural history


Broadly then, Annie researches and teaches social and economic history, and has a strong track record in collaborative work, both with other historians and academics from a wide range of other disciplines. This includes work on modern rural history, the history of health and healthcare provision in remote and rural Scotland with practising GPs; environmental history in collaboration with scientists, ecologists and engineers; the nature of creativity and innovation in Britain and the Empire in the nineteenth century.

Publications