Anna McKay

Biography

I joined Keele in December 2025 as Lecturer in Public History. I examine the lives and experiences of convicts, prisoners of war, enslaved people, and migrants as they crossed oceans, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Over the course of my academic career, I have secured a range of fellowships, grants and internships; recent posts include a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Liverpool, visiting fellowships at the Huntington Library, California, Yale University's Beinecke Library, the American Revolution Institute, Washington D.C., and the British Library Eccles Centre. Previous posts include a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College Cork, the Pearsall Fellowship in Naval and Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research, and a UKRI Policy Internship at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in Whitehall where I worked on the UK City of Culture Competition.

I have written for the Financial Times, Guardian, New Statesman, BBC History Magazine, The Conversation, RTÉ Ireland, and Times Higher Education, and featured on BBC Sounds and HistoryExtra podcasts. In 2024, I was a finalist in the BBC/AHRC's New Generation Thinkers scheme, and can be heard on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking.

Personal website: http://www.anna-mckay.com/

Research and scholarship

My PhD on prison hulks - battered ex-naval warships hastily converted as floating prisons - was an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Project between the University of Leicester and Royal Museums Greenwich, and was awarded in 2020. Prison hulks were used by the British government in response to a prison housing crisis - originally conceived as a short-term solution, they lasted for decades, spanning the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These dilapidated ships held both convicts and prisoners of war at home and in overseas colonial territories including Bermuda, the Bahamas, New York, Gibraltar and Ireland. Their fascinating history has been largely forgotten - this is the story of empire, prisons, and society as a whole.

My work interrogates a wealth of official reports, petitions, diaries and newspaper accounts. I have undertaken archival research in the UK, Australia, Bermuda, Canada, the Caribbean, Ireland and South Africa, and conducted site visits to dockyards, former prisoner of war depots and penal colony sites across the world. In 2022, my article '‘Allowed to die’? Prison Hulks, Convict Corpses and the Inquiry of 1847 was awarded the Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society. That year, I was also awarded a 'Seal of Excellence' quality label by the European Commission for a research proposal I developed with University College Cork. In 2023, my book proposal 'ShipShapes' was shortlisted for the Ideas Prize by publisher Profile Books.

Teaching

Modules I teach include HIS-10052: Applied History and CRI-30045: Popular Culture and Crime, with contributions to HIS-40092: Themes, Sources and Debates, HIS-10048: Modern History and History placement modules.

Further information

My working days are Monday and Tuesday.