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Born Cardiff 1940. BA Modern Languages, Oxford (St Anne's College); MA, Sussex; Doctorate (History) Université de Paris-VII-Denis Diderot, supervised by Michelle Perrot. Taught at Sussex and Edinburgh, appointed to the Chair in French at Stirling in 1990.. Since taking early retirement, have continued research in French and Scottish history and translating fiction (Fred Vargas, Georges Simenon, Virginie Despentes et al.). Past translations include most works by the French historian, Fernand Braudel. Current editor of the English online edition of the journal Clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire, and Chair of the Scottish Working People's History Trust. Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques; Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales; Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham (2015-2018)

Most of my research has been into women's and gender history, in both France and Scotland, with publications such as Britannica's Typesetters: women compositors in Edwardian Edinburgh (1989); France between the Wars: gender and politics (1996), and the first edition of the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (2005). Having gone back to my original love, eighteenth-century France, my current research is into the families of the French revolutionaries (chapter on "Revolutionary parents and children" forthcoming).

Publications: (since retirement)

2006: ‘Mistresses of creation: women as producers and consumers of art since 1700’, in Deborah Simonton ed., The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 341-379.

2007: Paris-Edinburgh: cultural connections in the belle époque, Farnham: Ashgate 2007 [shortlisted for Saltire History Prize 2007].

2008: ’Les dictionnaires biographiques et les femmes. Du coté des Anglo-Saxonnes’, Clio: Histoire, Femmes et Société, no. 28, 2008, pp. 261-274.

2012: ‘Patrick Geddes, Paul Desjardins and the Décades de Pontigny’, in Journal of ScottishThought, 5, pp. 17-26, [co-authored with David Steel].

2012: Marriage and Revolution: Monsieur and Madame Roland, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. [Winner, R.H. Gapper Book Prize 2012-13]

2015: ‘Comment peut-on être féministe? Les femmes des années 1930 face aux tensions internationales, ’ in Christine Bard, ed. Les Féminismes de la première vague, Rennes: PUR, pp. 217-225.

2018 (co-editor, with Elizabeth Ewan, Jane Rendall and Rose Pipes, and author of introduction) : The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.