Dr. Harris specializes in British, Women & Gender, Family History.
Professor Harris uses both her historical and genealogical training to study family relationships of the past, particularly in early modern Britain. Her first book, Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England (University of Manchester Press, 2012), examines the impact sisters and brothers had on eighteenth-century English families and society. Using evidence from letters, diaries, probate disputes, court transcripts, prescriptive literature, and portraiture, it argues that although parents' wills often recommended their children "share and share alike," siblings had to constantly negotiate between prescribed equality and practiced inequalities.
Publications
Her most recent work, Family Life in England and America, 1690-1820 (co-edited with Rachel Cope and Jane Hinckley) will be published by Pickering and Chatto in 2015. This four-volume collection of original sources (manuscript and print) brings together sources from both sides of the Atlantic and from a wide variety of regional archives. It is the first collection of its kind, allowing comparisons between the development of the family in England and America during a time of significant change.