Juliet Atkinson

Profile

I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in the School of History. In March 2025 I submitted my thesis on ‘Identification Documents and the Governance of Mobility in, through and beyond Seventeenth-century London’ for examination.

I hold a BA in History with First-class honours and a MA in Social and Cultural History with distinction, both from the University of Leeds.

Between 2022 and 2025 I was a teaching assistant on the first-year undergraduate module ‘Faith, Knowledge and Power: Europe, 1500-1750’.

My PhD is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH).

Publications

Juliet Atkinson, Kathleen Commons, Daniel Rafiqi and Samantha Sint-Nicolaas, ‘Beyond the Good/Bad Migrant Dichotomy: Ways Forward for Early Modern and Contemporary History’, Royal Historical Society Blog, Nov 2023 <https://blog.royalhistsoc.org/2023/11/19/beyond-the-good-bad-migrant-dichotomy-ways-forward-for-early-modern-and-contemporary-history/>

Scholarships and Awards

October 2021- March 2025: White Rose College of Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH) PhD Studentship at the University of Leeds

Recent conferences and presentations

• ‘Identification Documents and the Governance of Mobilities in Seventeenth-century London’, Boundaries in the Long Seventeenth Century conference, University of York, January 2025
• ‘Gendered Identification and Mobile Individuals Experiences of Authority in Seventeenth-century London’, Society, Culture and Belief, 1500-1800 seminar, Institute of Historical Research, December 2024
• ‘Identification Documents and Bordering Practices at Ports in Southeastern England, 1606-40’, Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies seminar, December 2024
• ‘Surveillance and Privacy in the Identification Documents of Transnationally Mobile Individuals in Seventeenth-century London’, Renaissance Society of America conference, March 2024
• ‘Multilingualism in the Archives of the Stranger Churches of Early Modern London’, Multilingual Archives in Premodern Societies workshop, University of Hamburg, September 2023

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, HIST1060 ‘Faith, Knowledge and Power: Europe, 1500-1750’, 2022-2025 Autum and Winter semesters

Organisational work

• Conference organiser – ‘Boundaries in the Long Seventeenth Century’ conference, University of York, January 2025
• Workshop organiser – ‘Beyond the good/bad migrant dichotomy: ways forward for early modern migration history’, Royal Historical Society workshop. Facilitated a session on ‘Intersecting Histories of Migration: Race, Gender, Class and Migration’, September 2023
• Co-convenor of the WRoCAH early modern migration reading group, 2022-present

Other activities

WRoCAH Knowledge Exchange Project (KEP), presented a talk to the staff at the Migration Museum in London discussing transnational migrant communities in the City of London in the seventeenth century and possibilities for including these histories in their future exhibitions and educational activities, May 2024.

WRoCAH Researcher Employability Project (REP) at the West Yorkshire Archive Service (WYAS). I worked to improve the public availability of their holdings of early modern naval records by transcribing their holdings of naval impressment records and creating a database of these transcriptions, July-August 2023.

Research interests

I am a social and cultural historian of early modern Europe and the Atlantic. My research interests are centred around the histories of mobility and migration; identity and identification; authority and governance; and gender.

My thesis examines the documentary processes used to identify people who were mobile into, out of, through and beyond seventeenth-century London. It develops the category of ‘identification documents’ to examine documents which were used by authorities to identify and thereby govern mobile people and their movements. I examine these texts not merely as sources of information regarding seventeenth-century mobilities, but rather as functional documents produced and used by a variety of actors. My thesis examines how authorities in London used documents to surveil a broad range of patterns of movements: movements within England; movements from northwestern Europe to London; movements out of England to northwestern Europe; and movements out of London to English America. In doing so, I demonstrate that the seventeenth century witnessed the development of a variety of different forms of document which were used to monitor and control a wide range of mobilities.

I argue that in the seventeenth century the identification of mobile people developed as a key logic and mechanism of governance deployed by a variety of different authorities in London in their efforts to govern movement and mobile people. This logic of governance was fundamentally structured by patriarchy. These processes of identification developed into a central aspect of how mobile people interacted with authorities in seventeenth-century London. These interactions were crucially shaped by gender and thus led to important gendered divergences in how men and women experienced both migration and authority. My thesis demonstrates that the development of processes in which authorities monitor and control movement, including transnational movement, is not a recent phenomenon, but rather developed in early modernity as a product of the relationship between heightened levels of mobility and authorities’ efforts to govern and surveil these mobilities by producing, using and storing documents.

Qualifications

• MA Social and Cultural History
• BA History