Dr Victoria Hoyle
Lecturer in Public History

Profile

Biography

MA Medieval History and English Literature (St Andrews), MA Medieval Studies (York), PGDip Archival Administration (Aberystwyth), PhD History (York)

Victoria Hoyle is Lecturer in Public History and Director of the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past (IPUP). She is also a historian of 20th- and 21st-century health and social care, specialising in participatory research, the co-production of historical knowledge, and working with communities of lived experience. Victoria originally joined the Department as a postdoctoral Research Associate on AboutFace, a UKRI-funded project on the emotional and cultural history of face transplants, in October 2019.

Previously she was the postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded Memory – Identity – Rights in Records – Access (MIRRA) project in the Department of Information Studies at UCL (2017-2019). This project worked with care-experienced adults on issues of memory, identity and record-keeping, to produce advice and guidance for social workers and government agencies.

Originally a medievalist, Victoria subsequently trained as an archivist and worked in archival practice for 11 years prior to her return to academia. She was York’s City Archivist (2013-2017) while completing her PhD, Who Do Archives Think They Are? Archives, Community and Value in the Heritage City (2018).

Victoria’s first book The Remaking of Archival Values was published by Routledge in 2022. She is a former editor of the Archives and Records journal.

Research

Overview

Victoria’s primary interests are in the social, cultural, and emotional impacts of public history practices. She specialises in the use of participatory, qualitative and action methodologies, working directly with individuals and communities affected by her research.

She is currently collaborating with colleagues at the University of Sheffield and Leeds on the impacts of urban wealth elites in northern cities since 1800. Victoria’s strand of the project will work with local and marginalised community groups to explore how histories of wealth can open up conversations about inequalities in the present. 

This builds on Victoria’s PhD research (‘Who Do Archives Think They Are? Archives, Communities and Values in the Heritage City’, York, 2018), which examined the relationship between archival heritage, social justice and democratic process, in the context of local and community activism. This is the subject of her book, The Remaking of Archival Values, which is due for publication with Routledge in 2022.

Victoria also researches child social care, health and wellbeing in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on difficult and contentious histories of trauma, violence and abuse. Her next book project will explore how histories of child sexual abuse have been constructed and presented in public in the context of recent transitional justice processes in the UK and Ireland.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Children and Childhood in Britain and Empire, 1850-2000 (1st year)

Histories in Public: Understandings of the Past in Today’s Society (2nd year)

Using and Abusing the Past in Britain, 1835-2018 (2nd year)

Postgraduate

De/colonising Memory: Public Histories of Empire, Colonialism and Postcolonialism  

Public History I: Meanings and Values in Public History

Public History II: Methodologies and Practices in Public History

Public History Placement