I am a senior lecturer in modern British history at Newcastle University, UK. You can contact me about my historical work at laura.tisdall[at]newcastle.ac.uk.

I am a historian of twentieth and twenty-first century Britain (yes, it’s still history), and am particularly interested in childhood, adolescence, chronological age, education, self-narratives and oral history, sexuality and gender, and the history of medicine. My book, A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools (Manchester University Press, 2020) focuses on teachers’ changing concepts of childhood and youth in primary and secondary modern schools in England and Wales from 1918 to 1979. This book was partly based on my History PhD (University of Cambridge, 2015) which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I also contributed a chapter to Siân Pooley and Jonathan Taylor eds. Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain (IHR Conference Series, 2021), where I discuss what children themselves thought about English and Welsh schools between 1945 and 1979.

My postdoctoral research, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2018-21) and a Newcastle University Academic Track Fellowship (2020-24), focused on how children’s and adolescents’ perceptions of adulthood in Britain have changed from c.1950 to the present day. This project considered adulthood, as well as childhood, as a constructed category, and contends that we can only understand the two in relation to each other. It explored 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?

My edited collection (co-edited with Maria Cannon), Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z, was published by the Royal Historical Society’s New Historical Perspectives series in 2024. Meanwhile, my second book, We Have Come To Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain, which tells the history of Cold War Britain through the eyes of children and teenagers, will be published by Yale University Press London on 28 April 2026.

In 2012-13, I received an AHRC student-led Collaborative Skills Development Grant for my project, Talking History, to collaborate with Rambling Heart 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 [pictured above]. Since then, I have continued to work with primary and secondary schools and with other organisations focused on young people, including collaborations with theatre company Cap-a-Pie and with the child-led Seen and Heard project facilitated by Investing in Children.

I have published journal articles in Twentieth Century British History, Cultural and Social History, Contemporary British History, Medical Humanities, History of the Human Sciences, Gender and History and History, and have also written for History and Policy, The Conversation and the Guardian and spoken on BBC Radio 4 about my research. My institutional profile is here. You can find a full list of my academic publications here.