Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
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Samantha Williams is Professor in Social History and Academic Director for History at ICE and is a member of the Faculty of History. Samantha took her BA in History at the University of Lancaster before moving to Oxford to undertake her MSc in Economic and Social History. She moved to Cambridge to complete her PhD on poverty and welfare provision under the Old Poor Law at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Before joining ICE she held lectureships in History at Goldsmith's College (University of London), the Faculty of History (University of Cambridge) and Trinity Hall (University of Cambridge).
Samantha is also an Official Fellow and Director of Studies at Girton College and an Affiliated Researcher at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Studies.
Samantha enjoys teaching students from all backgrounds and experiences. Her classes are a mixture of informal presentations and group discussion, with an emphasis upon historical debates and interesting themes and drawing upon original documents. She also supervises students on the MSt in History, the MPhils in Early Modern History and Economic and Social History, and PhD students.
Samantha’s research draws widely upon social, economic, cultural and micro-historical approaches to the history of poverty, policy, gender, and welfare provision under the Old and New Poor Laws. She focuses in particular upon the role of gender and the ‘agency’ of the poor in their precarious position. Her first book was a microhistory of poor relief in Campton and Shefford in east Bedfordshire, 1770-1834, a period of sharp increases in the cost of provision and the number relieved. Although provision was provided from ‘cradle to grave’, most of the poor were relieved during life-cycle crises (as a child, when rearing a growing family, and in old age), and, while relatively ‘generous’, payments did not cover all living expenses.
Her second book explores the experience of poor unmarried motherhood in London the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the establishment of metropolitan workhouses (c.1722) to the overhaul of the poor laws in 1834. The system of affiliation was like the modern ‘child support agency’ and offered mothers and parishes a way to claim back the costs of illegitimate children from putative fathers.
She is currently working on three projects: plague in seventeenth-century Cambridge, the Old Poor Law in Cambridge, 1601-1834, and New Poor Law workhouses.
Management Committee, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge
English Local History Advisory Board, University of Leicester
Poverty project consultant, Adam Digital
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
Economic History Society member
