Keynote Speakers

Elaine Murphy, Plymouth University

Keynote title: ‘Come my fellow sufferers’: the experiences of women on Stuart warships.

Dr Elaine Murphy is Associate Professor of Maritime History at the University of Plymouth where she teaches naval and pirate history. She is currently researching the experiences of women and the seventeenth-century navy. Her publications include Ireland and the War at Sea, 1641-1653 (RHS, 2012) and The British Civil Wars at Sea (Boydell and Brewer, 2018, with Richard J. Blakemore). She is co-editor of Volume II of a new edition of the Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (OUP, 2022). She was also a research fellow on the 1641 Depositions Project.

Aoife Daly, University of Copenhagen

Keynote title: Timber resources for Scandinavian shipping– a dendro-archaeological miscellany

Navigating between research opportunities and dendrochronology for commercial archaeology, Aoife analyses hugely diverse timber remains from our human past. Her specific research interest is on past timber trade, by identifying the provenance of archaeological and historical timber, also non-invasively. Most recently, she was PI of a cross-disciplinary ERC Grant: Northern Europe’s timber resource -chronology, origin and exploitation (TIMBER). Using archaeological, historical and scientific methods, the trade of timber in Northern Europe was examined, filling major gaps in our knowledge of past use of this sought-after resource. Aoife continues to analyse diverse timber structures, across Scandinavia and beyond. At the same time, she is supervisor of a PhD student, and has acted as examiner of several PhD projects. Aoife is also associate editor of the peer-reviewed journals Dendrochronologia and the International Journal of Wood Culture.