Dr Mary-Lou Jennings
By becoming a Fellow of Birkbeck, Dr Mary-Lou Jennings further develops her long-held connections with the College.
Having left school at 16, she trained as a secretary and worked in politics as a personal assistant to a number of Labour MPs. Bitten by the political bug, she was elected Labour Councillor for Hammersmith and Fulham, becoming borough member for the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) in 1974, where she chaired the schools sub-committee for two years.
By this time, at the age of 45, Dr Jennings enrolled on Birkbeck’s BA History. An MA in Victorian Studies followed, and then a PhD, entitled Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850–1892, which earned her Birkbeck’s Armitage Smith Memorial Prize – awarded every three years for the best research in the Faculty of Arts.
‘Being a single parent with three children, I thought there was no way that I could go back to college,’ says Dr Jennings, now aged 70. ‘But things changed when my daughter enrolled at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I suddenly thought ‘why shouldn’t I do a degree too?’ Birkbeck has changed my life in terms of qualifications and the way I look at things. To become a Fellow is a great honour because the College has given me so much.’
The result of her extensive period of study was a new career. In 1992 she became a part-time lecturer in British and Irish history at Birkbeck. She was later made Honorary Teaching Fellow in the History Department – now called the School of History, Classics and Archaeology.
Dr Jennings retired from teaching in 1998, but remained very much part of the Birkbeck scene as the College’s Alumni Governor between 1998–2002. This reprised a role she held between 1986–1992 as Birkbeck’s ILEA-nominee-Governor.
An elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Dr Jennings is busy editing an eighteenth-century census for the Irish Manuscripts Commission. ‘My next project is to edit the Sligo town atlas for the Royal Irish Academy’s Irish Historical Towns Atlas series. I’m also working quite extensively on the New Dictionary of National Biography, published next year.’ Dr Jennings is the General Editor of a project aiming to archive Irish newspapers from 1760 to 1922 onto microfilm. ‘This will also make these documents more accessible, and it will be a terrific help to students too.’
