Background and Research Interests:
Lily Chadwick (she/her) is Woodbrooke’s Programme Coordinator for Quaker History. Lily is by training a social historian of the early modern Atlantic with an emphasis on intersections of gender, authority/power, religious ‘radicalism’, and regionalism. Her particular interest in histories of women and religious dissent led her to the study of Quakers in this period.
Lily has taught on a wide variety of subjects and themes in history, most recently on topics related to gender and the body, belief and disbelief, movement and migration, and empire and colonization in the early modern Atlantic. The history of Quakerism, aided by the copious records created and preserved by Quakers and their Meetings, offers an exceptional medium through which to explore, uncover, and challenge our knowledge of these themes as manifested in the early modern period.
Lily strongly believes that the study of the past is critical to understanding our present world and may empower students, as global citizens, by equipping them with the tools necessary to strive for a more just and equitable future.
Qualifications:
Originally from the United States, Lily completed her BA in history and global studies at the University of Minnesota in 2018, her MA in history at Durham University in 2020, and her PhD in history at Durham University in 2024. Her doctoral thesis, Transatlantic Friends: Gender, Authority, and Regionalism, examines the development of Quaker Women’s Meetings in select locations across the British Atlantic between 1675 and 1725 and argues that differences in regional characteristics (governance, economy, demography, etc.) radically influenced Quaker women’s experiences of authority and agency within the gendered Meeting system. Lily’s PhD thesis was supervised by Professor Andy Wood, Dr Adrian Green, and Dr Amanda Herbert and examined by Professor Laura Gowing (KCL) and Dr Alex Barber (Durham).
In 2024, Lily was awarded a W.M. Keck fellowship at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California for her on-going project, “‘Deceit and Covetousness’: Re-Examining Indigenous and Quaker Relationships in Pre-Revolutionary America.” In 2025, Lily received the Barra Foundation International Fellowship at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for the same project. Lily has presented on her research at conferences in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe, and is currently working toward converting portions of her PhD thesis into articles and a monograph for publication. For more on Lily’s publication record, please visit her ORCID profile at: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-2602-4272.
