Caroline Dodds Pennock is a Historian. She is Professor in International History in the School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Sheffield. She is an expert on the Aztecs, early modern history, women and gender, and the history of Indigenous Americans.
Dodds Pennock received a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2004. Her thesis was entitled Warriors and Workers: Duality and Complementarity in Aztec Gender Roles and Relations. [1]
Dodds Pennock was Lecturer and then Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and then Lecturer in Early Modern History at Leicester University, before moving to Sheffield.
Her book Bonds of Blood won the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize in 2008. [2] Her book On Savage Shores: How America Discovered the World was published in 2023. [3] It was the New Statesman Best Book of the Year 2023, the Waterstones Book of the Year 2023, the Economist Book of the Year and one of the Smithsonian Magazine‘s Ten Best History Books of 2023. It was also a BBC History Magazine Book of the Year 2023, and one of History Workshop’s ‘Radical Reads’ for 2023. [4] It was serialised as the Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. [5]
For her "exceptional contributions to revealing histories of early contact between civilisations and expanding our understanding of civilisation", Dodds Pennock was awarded the 2023 Humanists UK Voltaire Medal. [6]
Dodds Pennock has contributed to the BBC, [7] Netflix, and the Science Channel, and has written for BBC History Magazine, History Today, and Scientific American. [8] She was a guest historian on the BBC's You're Dead To Me on the Aztecs. [9]
Suzy Eddie Izzard, is a British stand-up comedian, actor and activist. Her comedic style takes the form of what appears to the audience as rambling whimsical monologues and self-referential pantomime.
A flower war or flowery war was a ritual war fought intermittently between the Aztec Triple Alliance and its enemies on and off for many years in the vicinity and the regions around the ancient and vital city of Tenochtitlan, probably ending with the arrival of the Spaniards in 1519. Enemies included the city-states of Tlaxcala, Huejotzingo, and Cholula in the Tlaxcala-Pueblan Valley in central Mexico. In these wars, participants would fight according to a set of conventions.
Linda Helen Smith was an English comedian and comedy writer. She appeared regularly on Radio 4 panel games, and was voted "Wittiest Living Person" by listeners in 2002. From 2004 to 2006 she was head of the British Humanist Association.
Sir Simon Michael Schama is a British historian and television presenter. He specialises in art history, Dutch history, Jewish history, and French history. He is a Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University.
Gender roles existed in Mesoamerica, with a sexual division of labour meaning that women took on many domestic tasks including child-rearing and food preparation while only men were typically allowed to use weapons and assume positions of leadership. Both men and women farmed, but in some societies, women were not permitted to plough the fields because it was believed to symbolise men's role in the reproductive cycle.
Samira Ahmed is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster at the BBC, where she presents Front Row on Radio 4 and Newswatch on the BBC News channel and BBC One during BBC Breakfast, and regularly presents radio documentaries. She was named British Broadcasting Press Guild audio presenter of the year in March 2020. Her recent documentaries include Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse. She has presented Radio 3's Night Waves and Radio 4's PM, The World Tonight, Today, Sunday and has presented the Proms for BBC Four.
Bettany Mary Hughes is an English historian, author, and broadcaster, specialising in classical history. Her published books cover classical antiquity and myth, and the history of Istanbul. She is active in efforts to encourage the teaching of the classics in UK state schools. Hughes was appointed OBE in 2019.
Inga Vivienne Clendinnen, was an Australian author, historian, anthropologist, and academic. Her work focused on social history, and the history of cultural encounters. She was an authority on Aztec civilisation and pre-Columbian ritual human sacrifice. She also wrote about the Holocaust and on first contacts between Indigenous Australians and white explorers. At her death, she was an Emeritus Scholar at La Trobe University, Melbourne.
Siân Rebecca Berry is a British politician who has served as the member of Parliament for Brighton Pavilion since July 2024, succeeding Caroline Lucas. She was a co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales alongside Jonathan Bartley from 2018 to 2021, and was its sole leader from July to October 2021. From 2006 to 2007, she was one of the Green Party's principal speakers.
Alice May Roberts is an English academic, TV presenter and author. Since 2012 she has been Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham. She was president of the charity Humanists UK between January 2019 and May 2022. She is now a vice-president of the organisation.
Adam David Rutherford is a British geneticist and science populariser. He was an audio-visual content editor for the journal Nature for a decade, and is a frequent contributor to the newspaper The Guardian. He formerly hosted the BBC Radio 4 programmes Inside Science and The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry; has produced several science documentaries; and has published books related to genetics and the origin of life.
Suzannah Rebecca Gabriella Lipscomb is a British historian and professor emerita at the University of Roehampton, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Higher Education Academy and the Society of Antiquaries, and has for many years contributed a regular column to History Today. She has written and edited a number of books, presented numerous historical documentaries on TV and is host of the Not Just the Tudors podcast from History Hit. She is also a royal historian for NBC.
Dame Margery Freda Perham was a British historian of, and writer on, African affairs. She was known especially for the intellectual force of her arguments in favour of British decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s.
Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Enrigue is the author of six novels, three books of short stories, and one book of essays.
Anneliese Jane Dodds is a British Labour and Co-operative politician and public policy analyst serving as Minister of State for Development and Minister of State for Women and Equalities since July 2024. She previously served as Chair of the Labour Party from 2021 to 2024. She was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from April 2020 to May 2021, the first woman to hold the position, and Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities from 2021 to 2024. She has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Oxford East since 2017 and was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 2014 to 2017.
Rafida Bonya Ahmed is a Bangladeshi-American who is a writer, blogger, and humanitarian activist. In 2020, she founded the educational channels Think Bangla and Think English on YouTube. Along with her husband Avijit Roy, she was attacked and badly wounded by machete-wielding Islamic extremists at the Ekushey Book Fair in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2015, and Roy was killed.
Macuilxochitzin, also referred to in some texts as Macuilxochitl, was a poet (cuicanitl) during the peak years of the Aztec civilization. She was the daughter of Tlacaélael, a counselor to the Aztec kings and the niece of the Tlatoani warrior Axayacatl. She lived through the height of the Aztec civilization's expansion. Her life and works are an example of gender parallelism in pre-Hispanic Mexico, where women were given the same opportunities enjoyed by men.
David Adetayo Olusoga is a British historian, writer and broadcaster. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. Olusoga has presented historical documentaries on the BBC and contributed to The One Show and The Guardian.
Emma Griffin is professor of modern British history at Queen Mary University of London with particular interests in the Industrial Revolution and in social and gender history. She is the President of the Royal Historical Society and she is the author of five books. Her second book, Blood Sport, was awarded the Lord Aberdare Prize for Literary History. She had been editor of the journal History and co-editor of The Historical Journal. She was part of the Living with Machines research project – a multi-disciplinary digital history project based at The Alan Turing Institute and the British Library, which sought to rethink the impact of technology on the lives of ordinary people during the Industrial Revolution.
Jade Pennock is an English professional footballer who plays for A-League Women club Central Coast Mariners on loan from FA Women's Championship club Birmingham City. She plays as a winger, attacking midfielder and, occasionally, as a striker.