I’m a freelance author and researcher based in Cambridge. Since 2015 my essays and book reviews have been published in the TLS (see above), the Guardian, History Today, Slightly Foxed, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Dublin Review Of Books and the Journal of Victorian Culture, among others (there are links in my ‘Essays’ section in this blog). I am currently working on a book about the first fifty years of women at Cambridge, and in 2021 I was awarded a Women’s History Network Independent Researcher Award 2021-22.

Background: After studying at Queens’ College Cambridge for my Ph.D. in French literature I worked in publishing as a dictionary editor, and as a panel tutor at Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education. My monograph Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaire’s Art Criticism was published by Peter Lang in 2011, and my chapter on Tennyson was published in The Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2017).

In 2014 I began researching the stories of the women who had come to Cambridge in the 1870s and 1880s, and was awarded a scholarship to study for the M.A. in Creative Writing (Biography and Creative Nonfiction) at the University of East Anglia, and graduated with Distinction in 2015. My book proposal was a runner-up for the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize 2015 for the best uncommissioned biography, and since then I have given lectures and talks about 19th-20th century Cambridge women at the University Library, the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London, and for Literature Cambridge.

Do please get in touch by leaving a message below if you have any comments or would like more information.

Dr Ann Kennedy Smith