Our People
Dr Ismini Pells
Fellow, Ordinary Fellow
Departmental Lecturer
Department for Continuing Education
PhD, MPhil, BA (Cantab)
Ismini is a Departmental Lecturer in English Local and Social History and Course Director of the Advanced Diploma in Local History in the Department for Continuing Education.
Prior to joining the Department in September 2021, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, where she was the Project Manager of the AHRC-funded Civil War Petitions project (www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk). She has also been a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Exeter, where she worked on a Wellcome Trust-funded project examining early modern medical practitioners.
She studied for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she completed a thesis in 2014 examining the career of Philip Skippon, commander of the infantry in the New Model Army. Ismini has subsequently published this as a monograph: Philip Skippon, Philip Skippon and the British Civil Wars: The “Christian Centurion” (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
She has also published articles and contributed chapters to collections on various military and medical topics relating to the Civil Wars. She is a trustee of the Cromwell Association and sits on the Council of the Army Records Society, the Battlefields Panel of The Battlefields Trust and the Research and Collections Advisory Panel of the National Army Museum.