Dr Beckie Rutherford
Research Fellow
Institute of Arts and Humanities
History, Politics and Sociology
email: b.rutherford@worc.ac.uk
Beckie Rutherford is a historian of gender, sexuality, and disability in modern Britain, with a particular interest in the politicisation of disability from 1970 to the present day. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick in 2023 and was the RHS Centenary Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research 2022-23. In 2024 she was awarded an Early Career Fellowship Grant by the Royal Historical Society, where she is now an Associate Fellow.
Beckie is currently working with Anna Muggeridge and Eve Pennington on a UKRI funded research project Voices of Motherhood which investigates how women across the UK have been politicised by their experiences of (in)fertility, pregnancy, birth, and caring for children through infancy and early childhood since 1914.
Alongside academic research, Beckie specialises in public history. Since 2023, she has been an editor at History Workshop magazine, where she manages Reimagining Disability, an ongoing series of articles and podcasts.
Qualifications
PhD in History, University of Warwick
MA in Modern British History, University of Warwick
BA in History, University of Oxford
Teaching Interests
Beckie is currently teaching on HIST 3122: ‘Gender, Sexuality and Welfare: The Body in History’.
Research Interests
Beckie’s research uses oral history to explore identity formation in relation to gender, sexuality and disability. Her doctoral thesis was the first historical study of disabled women’s social and political organising in modern Britain. It challenged the erasure of disabled women from established narratives of activism and liberation movements by foregrounding their pivotal engagement with feminist, lesbian, and disability politics. By centring disabled women as agents whose influence extended far beyond their own communities, her thesis provides a crucial reassessment of disabled people’s relationship to ‘the political’.
Beckie is currently developing several publications from this research. She is also planning a postdoctoral project which examines the history of Disability Equality Training in Britain.
Publications
Book chapters
‘‘I started a new life when I joined Gemma’: disability, community, and sexuality in Gemma newsletters, 1978–2000’, in Tracey Loughran, Daisy Payling, and Kate Mahoney, ‘Everyday Health’, Embodiment and Selfhood Since 1950 (Manchester University Press, 2024), pp. 251-271.
Journal Articles
‘Disabled women and information activism in modern Britain’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming 2026).
‘Doing disability history in digital spaces’, Cultural and Social History (forthcoming 2026).
Other
‘Reimagining Disability’ series introduction for History Workshop (2024).
‘Disability History Month 2022: reflections on recent research’ blog post for the Royal Historical Society (2022).
‘“We moved together, we breathed together”: disabled women on stage in 1980s Britain’ blog post for the Social History Society (2022).
‘Remote oral history interviews with disabled women activists during Covid-19’ blog post for the Institute of Historical Research (2022).