Dr Julia Laite

Contact details

Office: Room 202, 30 Russell Square,
London, WC1B 5DQ

Email: j.laite@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: 020 7631 6370

Research Interests

• My forthcoming monograph, Criminalizing Commercial Sex:  Prostitution and Repression in London, 1885-1959 (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) examines the repression of commercial sex in London in the late nineteenth century up until the passing of the Street Offences Act of 1959, and represents the first extensive examination of prostitution in Britain after the First World War.  This research project examines state intervention into commercial sex at both the legislative and the street level, while also examining the sexual economy of London itself—and the experiences of women within it—in relation to these attempts at intervention.
• My current ongoing research project examines migrant sexual labour and immigration control.  I am exploring how fears about sexual trafficking were tied into wider anxieties about globalizing economies and labour markets, women’s mobility, and ‘undesirable migration’ in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.  I am examining how the control of trafficking became a priority for international organizations and institutions, and also assessing how these attempts at control profoundly affected individual migrant women.
• I use prostitution in this period to highlight many wider themes, which run through my present and my planned work:  the uses and control of public space; feminism, moral reform, and sexual politics; legislative change as well as the impact of local authorities and civil society; crime, policing, and the criminal justice system; underground and illicit economies and their relationship to other cultures and economies of consumption; technologies of surveillance and identification; and finally urban history and the history of London
• My further research interests include public health, gender, and venereal disease; and the relationship between gender, migration, and international industrial development.
• I am also very interested in public history, and in the ways that historical perspective can help illuminate contemporary policy problems.

Supervision

• I am happy to supervise research students in many areas of nineteenth and twentieth century British history, especially in the areas of gender and sexuality, crime and policing,  public health, moral reform, and urban history.
• If you are interested in pursuing research in any of these areas, you should first read our advice on how to apply for MPhil/PhD research before submitting an application.

Teaching Interests

• I teach on modern British History, including Group 1 History of Britain since 1750, and I run a BA Group Three option on Sexuality, Society and the State in Twentieth Century Britain.  I am course co-ordinator for the MA History of Britain and run a MA Option module on migration and mobility in modern London.  I also teach on the Victorian Studies MA programme.

Publications

• Criminalizing Commercial Sex:  Prostitution and Repression in London, 1885-1960 (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2011)
• ‘Conference Report:  Identifying the Person, Past and Present, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, September 2009’, co-authored with Gayle Lonergan and James Brown, History Workshop Journal, Summer 2010
• Review of Geographies of Regulation:  Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire by Philip Howell, Social and Cultural History (forthcoming Winter 2010
• ‘Historical Perspectives on Mining and Prostitution,’ Historical Journal (52, 3) 2009 (739-761)
• ‘Taking Nellie Johnson’s Fingerprints:  Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early Twentieth Century London,’ History Workshop Journal (65, 1) 2008: 96-116
• ‘The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, Abolitionism, and Prostitution Law in Britain,’ Women’s History Review (17, 2) 2008: 207-223
• Review of Women Police:  Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century by Louise Jackson, Gender and History (19, 3) 2007: 613-614
• ‘Neilans, Alison (1885-1942),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• ‘The women who still walk the streets of Victorian Britain,’ Parliamentary Brief (10,2) January 2007: 17-18
• ‘Paying the price again:  the UK’s new co-ordinated prostitution strategy in historical perspective,’ History and Policy, November 2006