Dr Ismini Pells

Ismini has taught across all the History award-bearing courses in Oxford Lifelong Learning. She is currently the Course Director for the Advanced Diploma in Local History, a one-year, part-time course taught entirely online at third-year undergraduate level. She is currently overseeing major changes to the second half of this course to enable students to explore the cutting-edge developments in digital humanities which can help historians understand and analyse primary source material.

She enjoys supervising postgraduate students and has supervised at both Masters and DPhil level for Oxford Lifelong Learning. She is an Associate Member of the Faculty of History. In this role she has supervised on the Faculty’s MSt programme and is currently co-supervising four DPhil students.

As Director of Undergraduate Studies, Ismini is leading a review of the Study Skills provision in Oxford Lifelong Learning. Study Skills is a vital way of helping all students, including those from non-traditional academic backgrounds, build the practical tools and confidence to succeed in their studies.

Ismini is an historian of the early modern period and the British Civil Wars in particular. She is especially interested in the military and medical history of this conflict and has published various books, articles and chapters on these topics.

Currently, Ismini is editing a volume of all the petitions for state-funded war pensions from wounded soldiers, war widows and orphans of the Civil Wars from London and the South-Eastern counties. This is one of a five-volume book series that she is co-editing with Andrew Hopper, which will make all of the documents from the Civil War Petitions project available in printed form. She is also editing a volume on military welfare in early modern Europe, with chapters contributed by scholars from across Europe and the US.

Ismini is developing her research into the role of children in early modern warfare and in how contemporaries dealt with perpetrators of crimes/atrocities during the Civil Wars. She is enthusiastic about public engagement and, amongst other roles, is a contributing editor to The World Turned Upside Down (https://www.worldturnedupsidedown.co.uk/). This project has developed free educational resources for teachers, academics and museum professionals dedicated to teaching the Civil Wars. It aims to make the period accessible, engaging and relevant for learners of all ages through podcasts, films and classroom resources.

Books

• I. Pells, Philip Skippon and the British Civil Wars: The ‘Christian Centurion’ (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020)

Articles

• A. Hopper, I. Pells and M. Bricknell, ‘Veteran welfare past and present: a sociological analysis of the Civil War Petitions, 1642–1718’, Frontiers in Sociology, 10 (2025). https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1495269
• I. Pells, ‘The Politicised Child During the Seventeenth-Century British Civil Wars: An Historical Perspective on Representations of Children and Trauma During Conflict’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 46 (2022), pp. 615-31. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09741-6
• I. Pells, ‘Reassessing frontline medical practitioners of the British Civil Wars in the context of the seventeenth-century medical world’, Historical Journal, 62:2 (2019), pp. 399-425. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X18000067

Chapters in Edited Collections

• I. Pells, ‘Petitioning Soldiers, the Power of the Patient, and the Provision of Military Welfare in 17th- Century England and Wales’, in R. Huzzey, M. Janse, H. Miller, J. Oddens and B. Waddell, eds, Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America: From the Late Medieval Period to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2024)
• I. Pells, ‘Understandings of adversity and resilience amongst women and children during the seventeenth-century British Civil Wars’, in J. Crowley and O. Rees, eds, Combat Stress in Pre-Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 171-98
• I. Pells, ‘From revolutionary bulwark to loyalist bastion: The Restoration refashioning of the London Artillery Company, 1660-85’, in L. Bowen and M. J. Stoyle, eds, Remembering the English Civil Wars (Routledge, 2021), pp. 145-67
• I. Pells, ‘Soliciting Sympathy: The Search for Psychological Trauma in Petitions from Seventeenth-Century Maimed Soldiers’, in E. Peters and C. Richards, eds, Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), pp. 129-50
• I. Pells, ‘‘Stout Skippon hath a wound’: the medical treatment of parliament’s infantry commander following the battle of Naseby’, in A. J. Hopper and D. J. Appleby, eds, Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars (Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 78-94
• I. Pells, ‘Scriptural Truths? Calvinist Internationalism and Military Professionalism in the Bible of Philip Skippon’, in R. F. W. Smith and G. Watson, eds, Writing the lives of people and things, AD 500-1700 (Ashgate, 2016), pp. 187-202