Dr Hannan’s research focuses on the home as a site of intellectual activity in the long eighteenth century (c. 1660-1830). She has worked extensively on women’s letter-writing as a way of understanding diverse and under-acknowledged intellectual cultures in early modern society. Her current research focuses on informal practices of science in the home. This research treats intellectual work as just one of many household practices and, by doing so, illuminates new connections between the domestic and the investigative.

Dr Hannan is a social and cultural historian working on British sources but with interests in Ireland, North America and the Atlantic world. Her research has particular relevance for developments within gender and material culture studies and also for interdisciplinary studies of home. The objective of the research activity is to understand broader cultures of knowledge in early modern society that operated beyond the individuals and institutions best known to our histories of intellectual life.