Mr Robert Hartle
BA (Hons), MA
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
PhD Student (History) | PhD Student (Archaeology)
+44 114 2XX XXXX
Full contact details
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
9 Mappin Street
Sheffield
S1 4DT
- Profile
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Thesis title: ‘Protecting the most Pious Mortal’: a historical and archaeological investigation of bodysnatching in London, c. 1740–1832
Supervisors: Professor Elizabeth Craig-Atkins (Primary), Dr James Shaw (Secondary)
History students - periods: 1500-1800 / Post-1800
Thesis abstract: My research will combine social and medical history with funerary archaeology to study bodysnatching for anatomical dissection in London, c. 1740–1832. It will reassess published reports and extant scholarship and be the first to analyse a substantial body of newly-excavated archaeological evidence of grave protection alongside extensive new documentary research, drawing on popular culture (e.g. newspapers) and community, legislative, and institutional records (e.g. hospital, criminal, municipal, and parochial). A London-focused case study will be generated, contextualised by wider English evidence, to test established narratives, providing important new insights into the demographics of those protected at burial. A far clearer understanding of the dynamics of the practice, its practitioners, and the public responses it evoked will emerge.
- Qualifications
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Education:
● PhD History, University of Sheffield, 2024–present
● MA Archaeology for Screen Media, University of Bristol, 2005
● BA (Hons) Archaeology, University of Bristol, 2003
Certifications:
● CITB Site Manager Safety Training Scheme - exp 2026
● CSCS (PQP) card – exp 2027
- Publications
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Books
- The New Churchyard From Moorfields Marsh to Bethlem Burial Ground, Brokers Row and Liverpool Street.
Journal articles
- The Clitherow workshop ‘at the Corner of Old Bethlem gate, next Morefield’: evidence for late 17th- and early 18th-century bone and ivory working from the
New Churchyard. Trans London and Middlesex Archaeological Society (LAMAS), 72, 251-300.
- Household assemblages discarded by Moorfields brokers: material culture in 18th-century London, EC2. Transactions of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, 72, 301-348.
- An important 16th-century finds assemblage from ‘Moorfields’, Liverpool Street, London. Post-Medieval Archaeology, 53(2), 225-265.
- Phylogeography of the second plague pandemic revealed through analysis of historical Yersinia pestis genomes. Nature Communications, 10(1), 4470.
Chapters
- The material body In Craig-Atkins E & Harvey K (Ed.) Manchester University Press
Dictionary/encyclopaedia entries
- Brathwaite [Braithwaite], Thomas (bap. 1695, d. 1730), anatomist and surgeon Oxford University Press.
- Kersey, John (b. c.1687, d. 1723), surgeon and anatomist Oxford University Press.
- Symonds, Joshua (b. c. 1692, d. 1731), surgeon and anatomist Oxford University Press.
- The New Churchyard From Moorfields Marsh to Bethlem Burial Ground, Brokers Row and Liverpool Street.
- Grants
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- PhD scholarship: AHRC White Rose College of Arts and Humanities
- Professional activities and memberships
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- Brentford Festival of Archaeology, July 2024
- ‘‘Necessary Inhumanity’: St Thomas’ Hospital and London’s Earliest Bodysnatchers’, lecture at the Old Operating Theatre, May 2024
- ‘Fittings for the dead: The coffin furniture of St James’s Burial Ground’, HS2 Workshop, April 2023