Dr Sam Willis and Professor James Daybell

Dr Sam Willis

Dr Sam Willis is one of the country’s best-known historians. He has made more than ten major TV series for the BBC and National Geographic including The Silk Road, Maritime China Reborn, Relics of China, Invasion!, Castles: Britain’s Fortified History, Outlaws, Weapons: Britain’s Armed History and Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History. His documentaries have won prizes globally. He has also written more than ten critically acclaimed and award-winning books, most recently three for the new Penguin Ladybird Expert Series: The Spanish Armada, The Battle of the Nile and The Battle of Trafalgar.

Professor James Daybell

Professor James Daybell is an Oxford-educated Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Plymouth, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.  He has produced more than eight books including Tudor Women Letter-Writers (Oxford University Press, 2006; paperback 2018), Women and Politics in Early Modern England (2004), The Material Letter (2012), Gender and Political Culture (2016) and Cultures of Correspondence (2016), and written more than 35 articles and essays on topics ranging from Renaissance letter-writing, Elizabethan politics, and secret codes, to the family, archives and the cultural history of gloves. James is Director of the AHRC-funded project ‘Gender, Power and Materiality in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800’ in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Director of the British Academy/Leverhulme-funded ‘Women’s Early Modern Letters Online’ in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the Bodleian Library. He is also series editor of two book series: ‘Material Readings of Early Modern Culture’ and Gendering the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds.