Alice McKimm

Alice McKimm is a PhD student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Her thesis examines the multivocal yet interconnected movements to establish women’s refuges across Britain and Northern Ireland between 1971 and 2010. Alice's research uses oral histories, archived social science material, and the archives of women's refuges themselves to explore how these groups developed their services for victims and survivors of different ages, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and disability statuses over the years under study. It further characterises women’s refuges as a collaborative social movement, considering their influence on cultural discourses and national policy. This project is funded by a Derek Brewer Research Studentship and a Gordon Glasgow Scholarship.

Prior to her PhD, Alice completed an MPhil (2021) at the University of Cambridge, studying the representation of everyday violence in archived oral histories, 1880-1988. She achieved a BA in History and French from Durham University in 2020. Her undergraduate thesis, which examined cultural dissociation from child sexual abuse in late nineteenth-century newspapers, won the prize for the best undergraduate History dissertation at Durham University.

In previous years, Alice has co-convened the Public and Popular History Seminar and the Modern British History Graduate Workshop, both at Cambridge.