Dr. Foyster is a lecturer in History, Fellow and Director of Studies at Clare College, Cambridge University. Her speciality is British social history from c.1600 to 1850. She has particular interests in the history of the family and gender history, and has publications on childhood, marriage and marriage breakdown, and masculinity.
Her fascination in the personal and emotional lives of ordinary women and men in the past, her love of gossip, and her nosey nature, has made all of these topics irresistible. More recently, she has written about child abduction, and has examined the letters that criminal prisoners wrote from eighteenth-century gaols. She has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to investigate the burden that faced families who cared for their mentally ill and disabled relatives in the eighteenth century.
Her biography of the 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, who was declared insane in 1823 is called THE TRIALS OF THE KING OF HAMPSHIRE was published by Oneworld Publications in September 2016.
