Jo Stanley (historian)

Jo Stanley FRHistS (born 1949) is a British-based author and creative historian who focuses on the gendered seas. Women and LGBT seafarers are among the hidden histories focused upon in her books, articles, exhibitions and conference papers, as well as plays and talks.

Her approaches to representing maritime pasts are seen by some as part of the opening up of new horizons in maritime histories and transport history. In January 2009 The Times named Hello Sailor! Gay Life at Sea, the traveling exhibition she co-curated for Merseyside Maritime Museum, as their number one exhibition. Her books have twice been in the top five Alternative Bestsellers List. They are translated and reviewed worldwide and her work is particularly influential in Scandinavia. her blog on the gendered seas is one selected by the British Library to archive for posterity.

Born in the forester's house next door to John Ruskin’s Brantwood on Coniston Water, Jo Stanley grew up as part of a Liverpool family of the sea and railway workers. She then spent most of her adult life in London. Her 2005 Ph.D. at Lancaster University’s Centre for Cultural Research, Wanted! Adventurous Girls developed after listening to the stories of pioneering women seafarers, who were absent from all the male versions of seagoing that she had heard.

In an unconventional career, her jobs included life story artist in residence in hospices, lecturer, journalist, playwright, curator, shop steward, barmaid on Brighton’s Palace Pier and artist’s model. Although traveling widely, after decades of dwelling in North London she currently lives by a derelict mill in West Yorkshire and works as a freelance author, consultant, and animator. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at Lancaster University’s Centre for Mobilities Research and at the University of Hull’s Maritime History Research Centre.

Her approach to historiography includes oral history, fiction and memoir creation, and working with story-givers on creating subjective maps of their past. She is also a textile artist specializing in re-texturising history by working with photographic images transferred to fabrics.