Category Archives: Allgemein

Zoe Thomas, Collaborating Couples: Intimacy, Power, and Professional Work in the Anglophone World, c. 1800-1939

This research project will form my second book.

‘Collaborating Couples’ will constitute the first critical study of the professional and intimate histories of romantically attached Anglo-American couples who collaborated in the same field of work between 1850 and 1939. It brings together research into approximately 500 married and queer couples working across the arts and literature, politics and social reform, medicine and science, history and archaeology, and education. To date (with the kind support of the British Academy, Harvard University, and Vassar College), I have consulted archives relating to this project across Britain, Greece, and North America, encompassing diaries and love-tokens alongside scientific notebooks and political tracts. Departing from the traditional biographical focus on famous individual partnerships (usually painters), this research asserts the collective significance of this international network of couples in facilitating social, cultural, and political change at the advent of modernity: overturning expectations of intimate relationships, pioneering new approaches to education and professional work, and agitating for social reform.

You can find my first open-access article relating to this project (focusing specifically on Anglo-American literary couples in Historical Journal here: ‘Marriage, collaboration, and the literary mass market in the English-speaking world, c. 1870-1939.’

Please do also get in touch if you want to discuss collaborating couples further: z.thomas@bham.ac.uk