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Research Interests

I am a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, usually with a focus on England. My first book, The Bar and the Old Bailey, was a collective biography of the English criminal bar in its formative years (1750-1850). It falls into two halves: the first identifies the barristers who practised at the Old Bailey, London's premier criminal court, and outlines their careers; the second explores the effect of the Prisoner's Counsel Act (1836) on criminal practice and the development of a professional code of conduct for defence counsel. 

My second book sets the 2004 legal ban on hunting with dogs in its historical context. Fox hunting, which emerged in its modern form at the end of the eighteenth century, was firmly established as England’s national sport by the nineteenth. In the twentieth century, however, it became increasingly controversial and debate over whether it should be allowed to continue developed into a major party political issue. This debate peaked following the election of New Labour in 1997. Discussion of a potential ban on the sport occupied 700 hours of parliamentary time between 1997 and 2004, eighteen bills to abolish hunting were introduced during that period, the Parliament Act had to be invoked to overturn the Lords’ opposition to a ban, and the House of Commons was physically invaded, for the first time in more than 300 years, by angry pro-hunt supporters. The Fox-Hunting Controversy explores the origins of the attack on the sport and explains why the ban proved so contentious.

My current major projects are a case study of the murder of Lord William Russell (1840) and a book tentatively titled ‘Foreign Attachment: Émigré Constructions of England and Englishness.’

Future research plans may involve theatre audiences in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain (my chief non-historical interest – apart from Labrador retrievers – is twentieth-century British theatre: Ayckbourn, Bennett, Gray, Hare, Pinter, and Stoppard). I’m also researching male domesticity.

Teaching

I am currently on sabbatical leave. For courses taught in previous years please see the links to the right.

Publications

Forthcoming work:

The Fox-Hunting Controversy, 1781-2004: Class and Cruelty (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate)

  August 1781 saw the publication of a manual on fox hunting that would become a classic of its genre. Hugely popular in its own day, Peter Beckford's Thoughts on Hunting is often cited as marking the birth of modern hunting and continues to be quoted from affectionately today by the hunting fraternity. Less stressed is the fact that its subject was immediately controversial, and that a hostile review – not so much of the book but of hunting itself – which appeared on the heels of the manual's publication raised two criticisms of fox hunting which would be repeated over the next two centuries: fox hunting was a cruel sport and a feudal, anachronistic one at that.                                                                                          This study explores the attacks made on fox hunting from 1781 to the ban achieved in 2004, as well as assessing the reasons for the continued, if limited, appeal of the sport. Chapters cover debates in the areas of: class and hunting; concerns over cruelty and animal welfare; party politics; the hunt in literature; and nostalgia. By adopting a thematic approach, the author is able to draw out the wider social and cultural implications of the debates, and to explore what this tells us about national identity, social mores and social relations in modern Britain.

'Fiction or "Faction”?: Literary Representations of the Early Nineteenth-Century Criminal Courtroom,’ in Michael T. Davis and David Lemmings, eds., Courtrooms and the Public Sphere (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate).

The Bar and the Old Bailey, 1750-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North

 Carolina Press, 2003). 

      Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New: Essays in Honour of J.M. Beattie, ed. Greg T. Smith, Allyson N. May, and Simon Devereaux (Toronto: Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, 1998).

'Forum Comment: The Bench, the Bar, and Crown Cases Reserved,' Law & History Review 29(1) (Feb. 2011): 289-96.

 Contributor, New Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford: OUP, 2008)

'Advocates and Truth-Seeking in the Old Bailey Courtroom.' Journal of Legal History 26(1) (2005): 71-7.

'Mary Hamilton, female cross-dresser (fl. 1746)'; 'John Silvester, barrister and judge (1745-1822)'; 'Newman Knowlys, barrister and judge (1758-1836).' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

'Female Criminality in Eighteenth-Century Halifax' (co-authored with Jim Phillips, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto). Acadiensis (Spring 2002): 71-96.

'Homicide in Nova Scotia, 1749-1815' (co-authored with Jim Phillips), Canadian Historical Review, 82 (4) (December 2001): 625-61, repr. as chap. 6 of Crime and Deviance in Canada: Historical Perspectives, edited by Chris McCormick and Len Green (Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2005).

For book reviews click here.

Law and Governance in Britain

I have hosted two 'social history of the law' conferences at Western, held in November 2007 and October 2009. A third conference, organized by Professor Margaret McGlynn, will take place in October 2011. For the conference webpage, click here.  Plans are also being made for 2013, with a focus on the 18th and 19th centuries.

Doctoral Level supervisory privileges

• 
• Office: Lawson Hall 1205
• Office Hours: On Sabbatical
• Telephone: 519 661-2111
  Ext: 85272
• e-mail: amay6@uwo.ca