Estella Chen

Research Topic

'Witnessing Law in the English Courthouses, 1700-1850'

Supervisor: Bob Harris

My main academic interests centre on the social and cultural histories of justice and law in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, particularly on trial procedures, spaces, and people. My DPhil research explores the lived experience of ‘the public’ in the trial courts of metropolitan London and provincial assizes as lay spectators. Besides drawing on patterns of court spectating to illuminate the courthouses as a site of sociability and to offer fresh insights into the popular interests in crime and justice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, I am interested in exploring what the treatments of various groups of court observers reveal about the intricate tensions surrounding ‘open justice’, as well as the fluid boundaries of identities among lay and ‘professional’ trial participants and of sympathy between the public and the judiciary. 

I received my BA (Honours Specialization in History) in 2022 from Western University, Canada, where I wrote my senior thesis under the supervision of Professor Allyson May. I then completed an MSt in British and European History, 1700-1850 at Wolfson College, Oxford, with my dissertation supervised by Professor Brian Young. I was awarded the Robert LaVerne Eagleson Gold Medal for graduating with the highest overall grades in the History Honours programme at Western, and the Best Performance in Cohort Prize for achieving the highest mark average in the MSt in History cohort of 2022-23 at Oxford.

My DPhil research is generously funded by the Clarendon Fund and The Queen's College, Oxford.