About
Research
Email: angela.platt@stmarys.ac.uk
Biography
Angela is a Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts, Course Lead in English Literature and Associate Head in Student Experience.
Her research explores lived experience, with particular interests in religion and belief, emotions, family and intimate life, and the ways people make meaning of their experiences.
She completed her PhD in History at Royal Holloway, University of London, examining love and religious experience in Britain between 1780 and 1850. Drawing particularly upon letters, diaries, religious writings and other personal sources, her research considers how religious belief shaped experiences of family and intimate life and, in turn, how relationships and emotions shaped people's experiences of religion.
Her more recent research has developed these interests through work on lived experience, public history and heritage. She leads a collaborative project exploring how the lived experiences of the past can be recovered through archival sources and communicated through participatory and multisensory approaches to public history. The project began through a partnership with Hogarth’s House in London, exploring new approaches to interpreting lived experience within historic-house settings, and has since developed through a partnership with the Panacea Museum in Bedford, examining the experiences of members of the Panacea Society, a predominantly female twentieth-century religious community. The next phase of the project is being developed in partnership with the British Association for Local History (BALH), extending these approaches into local and community history and exploring how they can be applied by local historians, heritage organisations and schools.
Angela is also developing research examining relationships, emotions and lived experience in the age of artificial intelligence, including questions around intimacy, emotional technologies and what changing relationships between humans and machines might tell us about what it means to be human.
Her teaching spans English Literature, History and Liberal Arts, with particular interests in literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present, critical theory, gender and sexuality, religion, public history, and the relationship between technology and human experience.
Academic qualifications
- PhD History, Royal Holloway University, 2026
- Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2019
- MA Historical Research, Roehampton University, 2017
- MSc Library and Archives, Clarion University of Pennsylvania, 2012
- BA Family Studies, English Literature, Theology, Cornerstone University, 2009
My areas of supervisory interest for PhDs include
- History of emotions and the senses, including love, belonging, identity, emotional experience and the relationship between feelings and cultural norms.
- History of religion and belief, particularly lived religious experience, spirituality, religious communities and the relationship between faith, emotions and everyday life.
- Gender, family and domestic life, including changing understandings of love, relationships, duty, intimacy and family identities.
- Cultural and literary history, particularly interdisciplinary projects exploring the intersections between literature, history, religion and society.
- Public history and heritage, including archives, material culture, collective memory, oral history and the representation of lived experience in museums and exhibitions.
- Technology, culture and society, particularly historical and contemporary understandings of identity, human experience and the relationship between humanity and technology.
Research
Research profile
Journal articles
‘Love Manifested as Unity and Division; Baptist Identity at Romney Street Baptist Church, 1815-1854’, Baptist Quarterly, 2020.
‘Pain as a Spiritual Barometer of Health: a sign of divine love, 1780-1850’, Studies in Church History, 2022.
Book chapters
‘Love and the Divine’ in A Cultural History of Love in the Nineteenth-Century, Forthcoming with Bloomsbury, 2023