Student profiles
Michelle Girvan
Email: M.Girvan@liverpool.ac.uk
Website: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/history/research/phd-students/michellegirvan/
Thesis Title
Institution
Supervisors
Professor Elaine Chalus, University of Liverpool
Professor Mark Towsey, University of Liverpool
Dr Sophie Jones, University of Liverpool
Dr Bryan Biggs, Director of Cultural Legacies, the Bluecoat
Research Summary
As Liverpool’s oldest building in the former UNESCO World Heritage Site, Bluecoat (formerly the Blue Coat charity school) offers a rare insight into the city’s eighteenth-century urban and commercial expansion, civic-mindedness and humanitarian impulse. Nevertheless, despite the institution’s historical and contemporary significance, the archived collections of the Blue Coat School remain relatively untouched.
My PhD project seeks to examine the eighteenth-century origins, function and financing of the Grade I-listed Bluecoat building — purpose-built as a charity school for poor children during the port’s rise to global significance. By embracing an array of research foci, my doctoral thesis will untangle the complex and interlaced relationships existing between philanthropy, religion, global trade, and social and political structures during the Georgian epoch. It seeks to illuminate the Blue Coat School’s affiliation with the Christian charity of Liverpool’s emerging merchant class and its subsequent interconnectivity with the lucrative slave economy. It will provide new insights into the Georgian care system and its pragmatic solution to childhood poverty while giving a voice to the hitherto untold experiences of Liverpool’s charity children. This research project will:
- shed light on the institution’s early architectural and spatial development as well as its sense of place through its exploration of Liverpool’s social, cultural, political and religious environment;
- demonstrate the significance of horizontal and vertical networks of family, commerce, religion, patronage and clientage operating through Blue Coat and eighteenth-century Liverpool more broadly;
- reinterpret the motivation for Georgian Liverpool’s associational charity and its education of the poor;
- provide an insight into the rudimentary education, socioeconomic identities and occupational destinies of Liverpool’s Blue Coat children while spotlighting childhood experience in one of the period’s fashionable charity schools;
- offer new perspectives on women’s patronage and labour participation in eighteenth-century Liverpool
- recontextualise the building’s complex relationship with global trade, colonialism and empire
This original scholarship aims to help realise two key objectives of the Bluecoat heritage organisation: the ‘protection and preservation of the building’s cultural, historical and ecological significance’; and the ‘successful interpretation and presentation of the site’s historic assets to ensure its future enjoyment, appreciation and understanding by the public’.
Research Interests
Sociocultural history in the long eighteenth century, particularly in connection to mercantile communities and childhood experience,
space,
place and environment,
digital humanities (DH),
the recovery of marginalised histories through public engagement
and decolonising the archives.
Publications
Conference papers:
2023 ‘Shaking the Archive Reconsidering the role of Archives in Contemporary Society Conference’, Queen Margaret University,
paper title: ‘Out of the Shadows: Deconstructing the Bluecoat’s Hidden Legacies of Care and Colonialism through Community Projects’.
2023 ‘Visibility and Invisibility’, Annual History PGR Conference, University of Liverpool,
paper title: ‘Out of the Shadows: Deconstructing the Bluecoat’s Hidden Legacies of Care and Colonialism through Community Projects’.
2022 ‘Change and Challenge’, Annual History PGR Conference, University of Liverpool,
paper title: “Vicious and Unactive’? Parental Agency, Devotion and ‘Interference’ at the Liverpool Blue Coat School, 1708–1800’.
2021 ‘At the Margins’, Annual History PGR Conference, University of Liverpool, paper
title: ‘Painful Labourers, Honest Men and Good Christians’: The Admission Records, Apprenticeship Agreements and Marginalised Experiences of Liverpool’s Blue Coat Children, 1709–1796’.
2021 ‘Resilience, Renewal, Recovery’, the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS), University of York and the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Contemporary Culture (ERCC) Research Unit, University of Melbourne, interdisciplinary conference,
paper title: ‘Painful Labourers, Honest Men and Good Christians’: The Admission Records, Apprenticeship Agreements and Marginalised Experiences of Liverpool’s Blue Coat Children, 1709–1796’.
Publications:
• Michelle Girvan, ‘Objects of Charity: Liverpool’s Blue Coat Children in the Eighteenth Century’ (Liverpool: Bluecoat, 2022), Public booklet.
• Michelle Girvan, ‘A Monument to Charity and Piety? Bryan Blundell and the Liverpool Blue Coat School’ (Liverpool: Bluecoat, 2022), digitised at: https://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/library/artefact/michelle-girvan-a-monument-to-charity-and-piety
• Michelle Girvan, ‘Decolonising Bluecoat: A Collaborative Project’, 16 March 2022, https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/history/blog/2022/decolonising-bluecoat/
• Michelle Girvan and Bryan Biggs, ‘Bryan Blundell and the Origins of the Blue Coat School’, 14 January 2022, https://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/about/news/bryan-blundell-and-the-origins-of-the-blue-coat-school