UH Press authors biographies

Sue Sadler is a Researcher in rural and sustainable development at the University of Strathclyde and an independent evaluation consultant.

Colonel J.D. Sainsbury was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, in 1938 and commissioned in the Royal Artillery during National Service, which he spent with a field regiment in Germany.

On release from full-time service he joined the Bank of England, where he worked until taking early retirement in 1989. He then spent twenty years as a historical consultant and archivist in the Honours and Awards Branch of the Military Secretary’s Department of the Ministry of Defence.

As a Territorial Army officer he served in local field artillery units and in a variety of staff jobs, until retiring in 2000. He was appointed OBE (Military Division) in the 1997 New Year Honours.

John Sainsbury’s interest in military history goes back to his schooldays but gained real purpose when, on joining the Hertfordshire Yeomanry (by then a field regiment of the Royal Artillery) he discovered how little had been published on the units of the Auxiliary Forces raised in the county.

Since his first book, Hertfordshire’s Soldiers, was published in 1969, he has written a number of books on the various units raised in Hertfordshire since Napoleonic times, ten of which are now available through University of Hertfordshire Press.

In recognition of his work in preserving and recording the history of military units raised in Hertfordshire he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1991.

Jeremy Sandford was a screenwriter best known for Cathy Come Home. His interest in the Gypsy cause led him to edit the news sheet Romano Drom. He died in 2003.

Andrew Sargent lectures in Medieval History at Keele University and is Editor of the Staffordshire Victoria County History.

Jinnie Schiele lives in London, trained as an actress and teaches theatre arts courses at a number of different universities, including a course on fringe theatre.

Sarah Semple is Reader in Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University.

Her work focuses on religion and belief in early medieval Europe, with particular reference to the role of landscapes and the ideological use of ancient remains.

Matthew Shaul is director at Departure Lounge, a contemporary photographic gallery.

David Short is a freelance local history teacher who ran the Ashwell Field Studies Centre for many years.

He has had a long-term involvement with the Hertfordshire Association for Local History and is a parish councillor.

As such, he is deeply immersed in both the past and present of Hertfordshire. He is the author of a number of local history books and a part-time shepherd.

David Sims is an Honorary Research Fellow in History at the University of East Anglia.

Canon Dr Terry R. Slater is Reader in Historical Geography at the University of Birmingham.

His principal research interest over the past twenty years has been in gaining a greater understanding of the processes and practical outcomes of English medieval urban planning.

Philip Slavin is a lecturer in the School of History at the University of Kent, specialising in late-medieval economic, social and environmental history.

J.T. Smith was a member of the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society. He sadly passed away in 2016.

Maggie Smith-Bendell describes herself as “privileged to be born in the era of the wagon and horse to good old-fashioned Romani Gypsy parents”.

She is immensely proud of her heritage and believes it was her early life that made her what she is today, an “activist for my race of Gypsy people”.

She campaigns tirelessly for the rights of Gypsies to live peacefully in accordance with their culture, and was awarded a British Empire Medal for her work in this area in the 2012 Queen's Birthday Honours list.

Toby Sonneman taught Journalism and English at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington until 2012.

John Sorensen is a Doctor of Clinical Psychology and has worked in mental health departments in Denmark and in the UK where the research to develop and validate the STIM approach was conducted.

Throughout his professional life he has been committed to the development of treatments and approaches that empower service users and are based on the needs of the individual. The STIM is just such an approach to mental illness.

Frank Sparing is a German historian and author. He specialises in the history of the European Roma and in particular the persecution of Roma in the period of National Socialism in Germany.

Deborah Spring originally studied social anthropology, later gaining an MA in garden history at Birkbeck, University of London, and a further MA in biography at the University of East Anglia. Formerly an academic publisher, she now researches and writes about history, with particular interest in women's history, the sixteenth century, gardens and landscapes.

Dr Adrian Streete is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, 1500-1780, at the University of Glasgow. He works on the relationships between early modern literature and the religious, political, and philosophical thought of the period.

Other books include

Refiguring Mimesis (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005)

Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2009; paperback edition, 2011)

Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570-1625 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

Filming and Performing Renaissance History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011)

Jill Sullivan is an Honorary Fellow of Exeter University in the Department of English.

Her research interests lie within the field of nineteenth-century theatre and popular entertainment, including regional theatre and alternative sites of performance such as the Victorian bazaar and fetes.

She has a particular interest in audiences and the censorship and reception of local and touring entertainments, both professional and amateur.

She has contributed chapters to a number of publications, including:

• ‘Managing the pantomime: productions at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham in the 1860s', in Theatre Notebook 60(2)
• 'Victorian pantomime libretti and the reading audience' in Allen, Collins, Griffin, and O' Connell (eds), Making Books, Shaping Readers (Ashgate, 2010)
• '"Local and political hits": allusion and collusion in the local pantomime', in Jim Davis (ed.), Victorian Pantomime: A Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)