Liz Stanley

Professor Liz Stanley is a Professor of Sociology at the School of Social and Political Science.  Her research interests include:

• Historical sociology
• Feminist theory
• Sociological theory
• Social change
• Narrative & auto/biographical methodologies
• South Africa
• 'Documents of life', in particular letters and diaries
• Everyday life sociology
• Norbert Elias & figurational sociology.

Her recent research outputs include:

• Stanley, L. (2021). Olive Schreiner, war and pacifism. English in Africa, 47(2). https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v47i2.4
• Stanley, L. (2020). An Empire of Letters: The Vindolanda Tablets, Epistolarity, and Roman Governance. The Journal of Epistolary Studies, 2(1), 4-18. https://journals.tdl.org/jes/index.php/jes/article/view/25
• Stanley, L. (2020). Harriet Townsend and networks of settler women in business in the Eastern Cape, 1840–1848. South African Historical Journal.
• Stanley, L. (2018). Dorothy Smith, Feminist Sociology and Institutional Ethnography Edinburgh: X Press.

Her current research focuses on 'Whites Writing Whiteness - Domestic Figurations & Representations of Whiteness in South Africa 1770s - 1970s', an ESRC-funded project. WWW research is shaped by the social theory of Norbert Elias and the textual analysis of Dorothy Smith and involves a Qualitative Longitudinal Research (QLR) historical sociology investigation of social change and the processes of racialisation in South Africa. WWW has developed from the ESRC-funded Olive Schreiner Letters Project.