About
Research
Email: anna.cusack@stmarys.ac.uk
Biography
Dr Anna Cusack is currently a Research Fellow on the UKRI/CERRL-funded project ‘The history and heritage of St Mary’s University: from Catholic teacher education institution to Catholic university, a future in retrospect’, working with Joe Saunders. She joined St Mary’s University in 2024.
Anna’s background is varied, and she began her career in the heritage industry and worked at various museums and galleries across London. She has worked as a freelance historian since finishing her PhD and has a range of clients in both the UK and around the world.
Her teaching experience includes taking on the role of module director at the University of Essex, a sessional lectureship at Canterbury Christ Church University, a tutor for Birkbeck, University of London and at the University of Oxford, along with running short courses for the Workers Educational Association (WEA).
She has held research fellowships at the University of Leicester, the University of Erfurt, and Australia National University and has worked on projects at Purdue University and Birkbeck, University of London.
Anna is an ECR board member for History Journal and a strand convenor for the Social History Society Annual Conference. She was a historical advisor for the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands and gives talks, leads tours, and runs workshops for various organisations.
Research
Research profile
Anna’s research interests are broadly on early modern English society from c.1480 – 1820 with a particular focus on social history and the treatment of the dead of marginalised individuals and communities alongside the history of crime and punishment. She champions public engagement with history beyond these research-specific dates and has a strong interest in local history and public history.
Publications
- Book Review: Carolyn A. Conley, Debauched, Desperate, Deranged: Women Who Killed, London 1674-1913 for The English Historical Review Published June 2022.
- ‘Cheating the Hangman’: Suicides in Early Modern London Prisons EPOCH 1 September 2022.
- ‘‘Being a great nuisance to the inhabitants’: Petitions to relocate executions and gibbets in eighteenth-century London’ written for manyheadedmonster.com/ picked up by The Times, 1 June 2021.
- ‘After They Were ‘Turned Off’: The Burials of Post-Execution Cadavers in London, c.1600-1800’ (accepted with revisions for London Journal 2023).
- ‘To be buried in a Cross-Way, with a Stake drove therein’: Burying suicides in London 1600-1750, (submitted for a special issue edition of De Gruyter Journal from the panel at RSA Dublin 2022, accepted and will be published 2025).
- ‘Forging Identities Through Death: The Quaker Dead of Early Modern London’ (to be submitted to Historical Journal 2024).