Staff Profiles

I am a historian of childhood, adolescence and chronological age in twentieth- and twenty-first century Britain. 

I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2015. I then taught first at the University of Oxford and then at Durham University before commencing a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in May 2018 at Queen Mary University of London. I started at Newcastle as a NUAcT Fellow in January 2020.

I am a historian of twentieth- and twenty-first century Britain, and am particularly interested in age, education, self-narratives and oral history, memory and selfhood, and gender and sexuality.

My past research focused largely on primary and secondary education in England and Wales between c.1918 and c.1979, exploring how concepts of childhood changed within schools in this period, and how this shaped teachers' relationships with their students. This resulted in my monograph, A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools (Manchester University Press, 2020). I have also worked on 'extraordinary' children in British science fiction and horror in the 1950s and 1960s, and what these frightening children tell us about new psychological and psychoanalytical ideas of childhood.

My current research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, focuses on how children’s and adolescents’ perceptions of adulthood in Britain have changed from c.1950 to the present day. This project considers adulthood, as well as childhood, as a constructed category, and contends that we can only understand the two in relation to each other. It will explore the tension between the ‘ideal adult’ – the psychologically mature independent actor who can, for example, give informed consent to medical procedures – and the real adult who often doesn’t live up to these ideals. What kind of adult did teenagers think they would grow up to be?

During the remainder of my NUAcT Fellowship, I intend to research chronically and terminally ill children in both Britain and the US since 1945. This project will consider both children's own experiences, and how they were conceptualised and treated by the medical profession. Ultimately, it will explore how terminally ill children formed a kind of 'test case' for adult concepts of childhood. Modern childhood was often understood as future-orientated, valuable only as a staging-point on the route to adulthood. But what happened when children had no adult future to look forward to?

In 2012-13, I received an AHRC student-led Collaborative Skills Development Grant for my project, Talking History, to collaborate with Rambling Heart theatre company delivering oral history and storytelling training to graduate students and early career researchers in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Cambridge. In May and June 2017, I received funding from Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund to run follow-up workshops with children and adolescents in Bath. In the future, I intend to continue public engagement work with young people.

At Newcastle, I co-convene the Life Cycles, Bodies, Health and Disease research strand, and run the HCA Academic Writing Group. I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2020.

My website is https://drlauratisdall.wordpress.com and I am on Twitter as @TisdallLaura.

I convene the third-year BA Special Subject HIS3346 The Rising Generation: Youth, Age and Protest in Cold War Britain.

I also contribute to the team-taught first-year BA Evidence and Argument module with a strand on 'The History of Childhood', the second-year BA Connected Histories module HIS2322 Diversities of Sexuality and Gender in History, and the MA History module SHS8128 Diseases In History.

I supervise BA and MA dissertations and have supervised or am supervising the following PhDs:

Heather Mann (2016-20): 'A Global Holocaust Education? The Battle Between Global and National Memory in British and French Education from 1980 to the Present Day', external co-supervisor at the University of Oxford.

Louis Bonnett (2020-): ‘The Natural Habitat of Youth? The Relationship Between Childhoods and the Environment in North-East England, 1985-2010’, external second supervisor at Northumbria University.

Lucy Walsh (2021-): ‘The Treatment and Experience of Children with Cancer in Britain since c. 1945’, NUAcT-funded, lead supervisor.

Jianhao Xu (2023-): 'Shaping Feelings: Emotional History and Left-Wing Children's Fiction in the Anti-Japanese War', second supervisor.

I was awarded Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy in January 2017.

• Articles

  • Tisdall L. State of the field: the modern history of childhood. History 2022, 107(378), 949-964.
  • Tisdall LA. ‘What a Difference it was to be a Woman and not a Teenager’: Adolescent Girls’ Conceptions of Adulthood in 1960s and 1970s Britain. Gender and History 2022, 34(2), 495-513.
  • Tisdall L. ‘We have come to be destroyed’: The ‘extraordinary’ child in science fiction cinema in early Cold War Britain. History of the Human Sciences 2021, 34(5), 8.31.
  • Tisdall L. Education, parenting and concepts of childhood in England, c. 1945 to c. 1979. Contemporary British History 2017, 31(1), 24-46.
  • Tisdall L. The psychologist, the psychoanalyst and the 'extraordinary child' in postwar British science fiction. Medical Humanities 2016, 42(4), e4-e9.
  • Tisdall L. Inside the 'blackboard jungle': male teachers and male pupils at English secondary modern schools in fact and fiction, 1950 to 1959. Cultural and Social History 2015, 12(4), 489-507.
  • Tisdall L. ‘That was what life in Bridgeburn had made her’ reading the autobiographies of children in institutional care in England, 1918–46. Twentieth Century British History 2013, 24(3), 351-375.

• Authored Book

  • Tisdall L. A progressive education? How childhood changed in mid-twentieth-century English and Welsh schools. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2019.

• Book Chapter

  • Tisdall L. ‘The school that I’d like’: children and teenagers write about education in England and Wales, 1945-79. In: Pooley S; Taylor J, ed. Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain. London: University of London Press, 2021, pp.197-219.