Meet the Team

Janette Bright

Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study (UK)

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Janette has been involved with historical research at the London Foundling Museum and Coram for numerous exhibitions, displays and artist projects since 2004. In 2011 she co-authored An Introduction to the Tokens at the Foundling Museum. In addition, she works part-time as a Museum Assistant.

Having obtained a BA Hons (first class) with the Open University, Janette successfully completed an MRes in Historical Research in 2017. Her dissertation considered how eighteenth-century children were educated and prepared for apprenticeship – the ultimate aim of the institution. She is currently working towards a PhD with the Institute of Historical Research, part of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. She is looking at the London Foundling Hospital (c.1739-1820) - how it was conceived, established, and maintained despite major challenges, constant criticism and in particular regarding ideas of reputation and trust.

Hannah Dennet

University of Warwick (UK)

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Hannah Dennett is in the final year of her AHRC-funded Midlands4Cities History PhD at the University of Warwick. Her research project is in collaboration with the Foundling Museum, London, and is uncovering the lives of African and Asian children taken into the Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century. As part of her partnership with the Foundling Museum, Hannah curated the exhibition, Tiny Traces: African and Asian Children at London’s Foundling Hospital, based on some of her findings. She has also written blog posts for the Women’s History Network and Egham Museum about various aspects of her research. Hannah’s interest in the history of the Foundling Hospital began over ten years ago, when her family discovered the story of her great grandfather Alfred Owen, who was a foundling admitted into the institution in 1876.

Virginia Grimaldi

York University, Toronto (Canada)

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Virginia Lynn Grimaldi is a teacher and PhD Candidate in History at York University. Her research attempts to answer questions concerning the politization and policing of women’s bodies, familial relationships, the power of melodrama and media, sexuality, discourse, and human agency in modern Britain. Her doctoral work uses the LFH as a means to track social changes over a long period of time, with a focus on gender expectations under “paternalism,” the “Fiscal Military State,” and the “politics of respectability” through a Foucauldian lens. In looking at the options, or lack thereof, for women who were unable to provide for their unborn children in both the 18th and the 19th centuries, she hopes to highlight the societal, governmental, and charitable influence on the private lives of London’s poor and/or “fallen” women at the peak of the Industrial Revolution. Virginia currently works at York University’s Teaching Commons and teaches undergraduate British history courses throughout the summer.

Roberta Zanasi

PhD University of Bologna (Italy)

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Roberta Zanasi graduated in Foreign Languages and Literature from the University of Bologna with a thesis on English medieval morality plays. After working in translations and teaching for several years, in 2018, she took a four-year leave from school to attend a PhD course in English Literature (Cultural studies) at the University of Bologna. In 2022, she obtained her PhD with a project on Victorian letter writing and its representation in literature and the visual arts focusing mainly on love correspondence. In 2020 and 2021, while she was Visiting Research Student at King’s College in London, she studied the letters from the mothers of the Foundling Hospital to the secretary Mr Brownlow and those exchanged between the mothers and fathers of the children. She held a seminar on the topic in the event “Le radici della scrittura” (The roots of writing) organized by the faculty of Philology of the University of Bologna.

Roy Sloan

Independent Researcher (UK)

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Roy Sloan gained his PhD from Glasgow University in 1984, but spent most of his career as a teacher at Haberdashers’ Boys’ School, Elstree and was Head of History there from 1992 until 2012.  He has written a political biography of William Smith O’Brien (2000), Irish rebel and a major figure in his PhD, and an analysis of the Balkans settlement after the First World War (The Peace of Conquerors, 2018).  He has examined these and several other topics in his History website, historyhamper.com.  The history of the Foundling Hospital in the middle decades of the nineteenth century features prominently in historyhamper; the articles include an assessment of John Brownlow and a study of the fates of boys and girls who left the Hospital in the 1850s.  He is a guide at the Foundling Museum, where his interest in the Hospital was first kindled.