University of Sunderland

DR PETER RUSHTON

BA (Hons, Cantab), MA (Econ), PhD
READER IN HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, SUBJECT LEADER, SOCIOLOGY IN COMBINED SUBJECTS

BIOGRAPHY

Peter Rushton is Sociology programme leader for Joint Honours.  His teaching interests involve the family, gender relations, law and systems of punishment, and sociological theory.  He was in the Research Assessment Exercise (2008) as part of the History submission.

RESEARCH INTERESTS AND EXTERNAL ENAGAGEMENTS

Peter has published widely on aspects of the personal and social relations of early modern England, as revealed in legal and administrative records of North-East English counties.  He has written on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century witchcraft, the problems of marriage and family life in the early modern period, the organisation of the old poor law, and the care of the mentally ill and disabled.  In addition, he has an interest in NE history and the problems of the periphery and the central state in the early modern period.  He sits on the management committee of the NE England History Institute, and is the Publications Secretary.

CURRENT WORK

Peter is working on a number of projects at the moment.  One is the problem of local identity in the early modern (pre-1800) period, particularly as it affected the North East.  A study of Gateshead before the 1700s will be published in 2009 as part of a joint history of Newcastle and Gateshead, forthcoming with Philimore.

A major focus of interest is the law of treason and sedition in the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth century, when almost any criticism or attempt to reform systems of government were liable to be treated as treacherous.  Both speech and the written word were subject to official attempts legal repression, with various degrees of success.  In America, such efforts led to the American Revolution, while in Britain, the foundations of radical politics were shaped by the efforts of various governments to suppress critical opposition.

POSTGRADUATE SUPERVISION

Peter is director of studies, along with colleagues, in supervising:

Evelyn Appiah-Donyina, `Constructions and Uses of Lifelong Learning by Ghanaian Women'.

Wendy Brennan, `Participation or Experience: Local Authority practice models of engaging young people (14-21) within public policies and local services in the North East of England'.

Adam Robertson, `Policing by Consent; Myth or Reality: An Examination of the Ethical Dimensions of Policing by Consent in England and Wales'.

Daw Tarhoni, `Higher education and Tribal identity in modern Libya'.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS AND RESEARCH REPORTS

Sole author:

`Lunatics and Idiots: Mental Disability, the Community and the Poor Law in North East England, 1600-1800', Medical History, 32, 1988, 34-50.

`Texts of Authority: Witchcraft Accusations and the Demonstration of Truth in Early Modern England', originally given as a paper at Swansea September 1998, conference on Reading Witchcraft , published in Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (Macmillan, 2000) 21-39.

`Law in North-East England: Community, County and Region, 1550-1850', in Regional Identity in North-East England circa 1300-2000, ed. Adrian Green and A. J. Pollard (part of the series, Studies in Regions and Regionalism, Boydell and Brewer, 2007).

With Dr Gwenda Morgan:

'Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: the Formation of the Criminal Atlantic' (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).

'Print Culture and Patterns of Exchange in the Formation of the Criminal Atlantic' Continuity and Change, 22 (1), (2007) 49-71.