Dr Heather Falvey

Heather teaches local and social history at Certificate, Diploma, Advanced Diploma and Masters level at PACE and also at the University of Oxford’s Department of Continuing Education. She is reviews editor for The Local Historian and editorial assistant for the Economic History Review.  

Her forthcoming Certificate course on early modern culture will cover various aspects of everyday life in Tudor and Stuart England.  Her main historical interests are social unrest and discord in early-modern communities and this is reflected in one of her current recent research projects, which concerns objections to a disorderly alehouse in Rickmansworth (Herts) in 1588. She has published several editions of texts including fifteenth century wills, the prospectus for a seventeenth century economic project, a book of eighteenth century recipes and letters written by the family of Humphry Repton, the landscape gardener.

Her course sessions usually comprise a combination of teaching, looking at online resources, and considering samples of documentary evidence from the period. Learning how to analyse such documents  gives students an understanding of how historians assemble and interpret evidence and thus helps them to carry out their own historical research.