The Department of Linguistics and English Language has recently appointed a Newby Fellow, Dr. Helen Baker, to work on the CASS project entitled ‘Newspapers, Poverty and Long-Term Change. A Corpus Analysis of Five Centuries of Texts’.

Dr. Baker is a social historian who was awarded her Ph.D. in Russian History at the University of Leeds in 2002. Her thesis examined popular reactions to the Khodynka disaster, a stampede which took place during the coronation celebrations of Nicholas II in 1896. She taught Russian and European history at the University of Bradford before working as a teaching assistant in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Leeds between 2003-2007.

Helen Baker has previously worked as a transcriber and historical researcher for the Department of Linguistics and Language, completing a historical chronology of the Scottish Glencairn Uprising of 1653 for the British Academy funded ‘Newsbooks at Lancaster’ project. This research sparked an interest in early modern history and she went on to investigate the lives of seventeenth-century English prostitutes. Her first book, co-authored with CASS Centre Director, Professor Tony McEnery, is forthcoming and uses the study of early-modern prostitution as a case study to illustrate that historians and corpus linguists have much to gain through academic collaboration.

The project ‘Newspapers, Poverty and Long-Term Change’, which is funded by the Newby Trust, aims to assemble the largest ever corpora of newspapers and related material from 1473 to 1900 and use this to investigate changing discourses on poverty across this period. Dr. Baker will officially join the project on 1 July 2014, working with Professor Tony McEnery, Dr. Andrew Hardie, and Professor Ian Gregory.

The appointment will mean something of a home-coming for Helen Baker, who studied for her undergraduate degree in the History Department at Lancaster University between 1994-1997.