Kingston University London

Overview

Dr Hawkins works as a historical researcher on several projects within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She gained her doctorate in history, on nursing in Victorian London, at Kingston University in 2007. She managed the Great Ormond Street Hospital Victorian Patient Admissions database project run by the university's Centre for Local History studies, and is currently managing this project's extension to cover three further children's hospitals. She is also working on a three year oral history project, Museum Lives, jointly run by the Natural History Museum and Kingston University's School of Humanities, and which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her research interests include nursing in Victorian England; women's increasing participation in the workplace in the 19th and early 20th centuries; the development of health care provision for children, and the use of archival material to generate life histories of ordinary working women. She is also very interested in using IT to open up archival material, making such important historical evidence much more easily available and accessible to historians, and is involved in creating databases and designing websites which present such information in a much more user-friendly way.

In 2010 her book "Nursing and Women's Labour in the Nineteenth Century - the Quest for Independence" was published. Nursing and Women's Labour in the Nineteenth century This book presents a new examination of Victorian nurses which challenges commonly-held assumptions about their character and motivation.  Uniquely, the study views nursing through an economic lens, as opposed to the more usual vocational focus.