Jessica Clark (B.A., Trent; M.A., York; M.A., Ph.D., Johns Hopkins) teaches courses in the history of Britain and its empire. Before joining the department, she taught at McGill, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her research interests include modern British cultural and social history, focusing on the ways that consumption, labour, and gender shaped urban space—and lived experiences—in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Clark’s first book, The Business of Beauty: Gender and the Body in Modern London (Bloomsbury 2020), charts the role of London-based entrepreneurs in creating a commercial beauty culture while navigating widespread critiques of beautification through the nineteenth century. Other work appears in the Women’s History Review, Gender and Material Culture in Britain after 1600 (Palgrave 2015), and the Victorian Periodicals Review. She is currently working as volume editor of A Cultural History of Beauty: The Age of Empire (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and as co-editor, with Nigel Lezama, of Canadian Critical Luxury Studies: Recentering Luxury (Intellect, forthcoming). She is also a co-editor on The Recipes Project, a scholarly blog that showcases international research on food, magic, technologies, medicine, beauty, and more.