Dr Sally Holloway

Dr Sally Holloway is a social and cultural historian with a particular interest in the rituals which give structure and meaning to everyday life, and how men and women conceptualise and navigate their emotional lives. She has published widely on histories of emotions, courtship and marriage, letter-writing, gifting practices, and the affective meanings of material culture. She is the author of The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture (Oxford, 2019) and co-editor of Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History (Oxford, 2018) and A Cultural History of Love in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2024). With Ute Frevert and Katie Barclay, she co-edits the Oxford University Press series ‘Emotions in History’.

Sally is currently an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellow at the University of Warwick, where she is working on a major new project on the history of heartbreak, titled After Love: Romantic Heartbreak, Emotions and Embodiment in Britain c. 1750-1900. Prior to joining Warwick, she held a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University, and an International Visiting Research Fellowship at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She has taught at Royal Holloway, Queen Mary University of London, and Richmond, The American International University in London.

Sally has extensive public engagement experience in both broadcasting and heritage, having spent a decade as a researcher for factual history programmes on BBC television and radio, and acting as a consultant for the BBC FOUR series A Very British Romance. From 2013-16 she was an Associate Researcher at Historic Royal Palaces, conducting research to underpin a series of exhibitions at Kensington Palace and Hampton Court to mark the tercentenary of the Hanoverian succession. Her most recent collaboration has been with the London Foundling Museum, on their multi-platform exhibition and podcast, Take this Token. You can find Sally talking about her research on podcasts including You’re Dead to Me, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, History Extra, and The Thing About Austen.