User Advisory Group (UAG) delegates represent different sections of our user community, not just their own interests.
As well as attending UAG meetings, each delegate has a responsibility to cascade the details of the meetings to members of their user community and gather feedback from them.
Academic Research
Dr Jeremy Stocker
Dr Jeremy Stocker is an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in London, and an independent historian and defence analyst. He served in the Royal Navy and Royal Naval Reserve for nearly 40 years, retiring in 2016. Captain Stocker saw active service in the Persian Gulf and in Afghanistan. With interests including nuclear weapons, missile defence and naval history, he is currently editing a series of volumes for the Navy Records Society.
Academic users
Jennifer Aston
Jennifer Aston is Senior Lecturer in History and Director of the Institute of Humanities at Northumbria University. She has published on gender and small business ownership and bankruptcy in the 19th and early 20th century, and is a co-founder of ReWOMEN (Researching Women of Management and Enterprise Network).
Jennifer has recently started a new project which will use petitions heard before the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes 1857-1923 to explore issues of domestic abuse, the economic cost of divorce, child custody and mediation, and the development of the family law profession.
Richard Marks
Richard Marks became a freelance professional historian after a career in the technology industry as a manufacturing system engineer and is also a doctoral candidate. His thesis examines the role of railways in the industrialisation of rural counties in the nineteenth century.
He is a published author and frequent user of the National Archives for research as well as numerous other archive collections across the country. Richard is a frequent speaker on historical topics and is currently researching the history of a number of British Aircraft manufacturing companies. Richard is a passionate supporter of archives across the country, often using social media to promote the use of historical record collections and museum archives.
County/external archives
Alison Kay
Alison Kay is the Archives Manager at the National Railway Museum (NRM), part of the Science Museum Group. Alison manages the NRM’s vast manuscript, photography, moving image and sound collections and a team of archivists. She has worked in railway archives since qualifying as an archivist in 2008.
Alison led a successful Archives Accreditation application for the NRM and has worked on diverse research and exhibition projects including Ambulance Trains where she researched The National Archives’ war diaries.
Diversity and Inclusion
Dr Anne Samson
Dr Anne Samson is an independent historian specialising in the First World War in Africa. She runs the Great War in Africa Association (https://gweaa.com) and a small publishing house which has a Great War in Africa imprint. Anne is passionate about education, global access to archives and dispelling myths about the past.
Anne advises and works on cross-country and -cultural projects. She liaises with researchers across the globe, mainly with an interest in the First World War in Africa but not exclusively. While Anne has experience of researching in diverse archives in the UK and South Africa, she is aware of the challenges researchers face accessing archives in the UK as well as Africa, India, and the Caribbean. Her work as researcher, author, publisher and speaker, in different countries, as well as having grown up in Apartheid South Africa, means she is constantly negotiating the complexities of issues such as language and inequalities when dealing with the past, not least imperial and colonial history.
Caroline Nielsen
Caroline Nielsen is Senior Lecturer in History and Heritage at the University of Northampton. She researches the different experiences of people with disabilities and mental health conditions from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. She is Programme Leader for BA History at Northampton and presents the ‘Oh the Humanities’ podcast for NLive Northampton community radio. Caroline is currently working on a project looking at responses to self-harming behaviours within the 19th century British army.
Caroline is passionate about encouraging interdisciplinary use of the historic materials, and is especially interested in how archival materials can be used to help inform current health and scientific debates and research. She can be reached at caroline.nielsen@northampton.ac.uk
Family history and online users
Pat Reynolds
Pat Reynolds is the Executive Director of Free UK Genealogy CIO – the charity behind FreeBMD, FreeCEN and FreeREG. Her previous work has included leading the Surrey History Centre and being a Museum Development Officer.
She is researching her own family tree using, where possible, free resources including The National Archives and Wikitree. As she is partially sighted, Pat relies on the high-quality digitization of material on the web, and high-quality transcriptions.
Lisbet Sherlock
Following a successful business career in market research and corporate communications in the high-tech sector, Lisbet Sherlock has returned to her academic roots and now dedicates her time to history projects. As an independent researcher she is currently focussed on the history of two militant suffragettes whose dramatic story is hiding in plain sight in archives across the country as well as researching and writing the history of a Hertfordshire farm.
Independent researchers
Sue Adams
Sue Adams is a professional genealogist who qualified with an MSc in Genealogical, Palaeographic and Heraldic Studies from the University of Strathclyde in 2012. She is currently working on a PhD using late manorial records at the University of Lincoln, reflecting her research interests in 17th to 19th century land and property.
Sue is a member of the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives, the Register of Qualified Genealogists and the Association of Professional Genealogists.
Map Room users
Susan Moore
Susan Moore has been a full-time independent researcher at The National Archives all her working life, principally working in the Map & Large Document Reading Room. Although she has extensive knowledge of a wide range of medieval and early modern records, particularly those relating to land, at The National Archives and elsewhere, she specialises in all periods of the Chancery court records and is the author of books, courses and articles on this subject.
Susan is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a trustee of the British Association for Local History (www.balh.org.uk).
Map Room users and overseas researcher
Roger Fisher
Roger Fisher is an Associate Professor of Humanities at York University, Toronto, Canada, and a barrister and solicitor with the Law Society of Ontario. His research at The National Archives examines the intersection between law, literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on the court records for lawsuits in the 1700s and early 1800s having to go with the performing arts, music publishing, and copyright. He looks forward to providing the perspective of an overseas user to the Users Advisory Group and welcomes the input of other overseas users. He may be reached at rfisher@yorku.ca
On site personal interest
Mike Grahn
Mike Grahn has a professional background as an academic in medical research and technology development. At The National Archives his interests focus on the history of technology and healthcare and, currently, the development of the gas mantle industry. He is interested in facilitating user involvement in the development of the catalogue and finding aids to support cross-connectivity between archives and subject specialists.
Contact Mike with any issues and suggestions regarding your on site personal interest use of the Archives.
Student and online users Academic Users / Diversity & Inclusion & LGBTQ
Matthew Cleary
Matthew Cleary is currently a PhD candidate in Law at the University of Edinburgh. Matthew’s research focuses on 15th- and 16th-century English inheritance law, more specifically on the administration of wills under canon and common law.
Matthew is attached to the Centre for Legal History within the Edinburgh Law School. Previously Matthew studied in Canada where he received a BA Spec. Hons. and MA degrees in History.
Matthew is passionate about supporting researchers in their historical projects and looks forward to voicing the comments and suggestions of online and student users of The National Archives. Matthew can be reached at m.cleary-1@sms.ed.ac.uk.
James Fenwick
James Fenwick is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Media at Sheffield Hallam University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has authored numerous archive-based film and media history books, including Stanley Kubrick Produces, Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industries, and Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive.
He is the co-founder of the Archives and Archival Methods Special Interest Group for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) and founder and lead of the Archive Research Community. He is particularly interested in enhancing collaborative relationships between archivists and researchers.