Caitlin Adams

CAITLIN ADAMS is an historian of nineteenth-century histories of poverty and the family. She completed her Master of Research in the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University in 2018. Her thesis, “’Under my own Care’: Poverty and Motherhood in New South Wales and Gloucestershire between 1820 and 1834,” explored the attitudes and experience of mothers living in poverty in Australia and England in the early nineteenth century. Her PhD thesis, which she will commence in 2019 at the University of Cambridge, builds on this research.

Caitlin is a dedicated and creative public historian whose projects have included creating teaching materials to accompany the Australian Centre for Public History’s HistoryLab podcasts at the University of Technology, Sydney as well as developing and delivering a two-hour “Poor and Prosperous” walking tour of Ashfield as part of  the History Council’s “History Week” in 2018. To explore the themes of poverty, punishment and charity, the walking tour traced the life of a fictitious working-class woman who might have lived and worked in Ashfield, and the potential life-trajectories of her child. Commencing at the estates where she would have worked, the tour imagined a fall from grace through illegitimate pregnancy and its consequences. By connecting grand houses to sites of poverty and death, the tour catered to a range of audience tastes through the spectacle of grandeur and the thrill of scandal.

Publications

  • with Rachel Franks, “Baby Farming and Betrayal: Foster Mothers Who Murder,” in Charlotte Beyer and Josephine Savarese (eds.), Infanticide / Mothers Who Kill, (Ontario: Demeter Press, forthcoming).
  • “Related Histories: Studying the Family Conference,” Review of Related Histories Conference, Macquarie University Centre for Applied History Website, (November, 2018)
  • “Carers, Citizens, Commodities: Australian Mothering Past and Present,” Review of Australian Mothering in Contemporary and Historical Perspective Symposium, Vida: Blog of the Australian Women’s History Network, (March, 2018).

Qualifications

  • MRes (Modern History) Macquarie University (2018)
  • BA (Major: History) Macquarie University (2016)
  • BEd (Primary) Macquarie University (2016)

Contributions

Follow Caitlin Adams on Twitter: @CaitlinAdams314