Dr Jo Thor
Postdoctoral Fellow, November 2024 - August 2025
Home institution: University of Edinburgh
Jowita A. Thor is a social historian with an expertise in the history of Christian charities targeted at marginalised women. Her monograph Magdalene Asylums in Scotland: Protestant Philanthropy, 1797–1914 will be published this autumn with EUP.
Her previous work, before joining IASH in November 2024, includes ESRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Strathclyde’s School of Law where she explored the socio-legal history of prostitution in nineteenth-century Scotland, research for Dr Louise Brangan’s project on decarceration of Magdalene women in twentieth-century Ireland, and event and project management for the Centre of Theology and Public Issues. She has presented at a vast number of conferences including those hosted by Social History Society, Scottish History Society and Ecclesiastical Historical Society, and lectured at Edinburgh University’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology. She has published in Studies in Church History, Scottish Church History, and most recently contributed a peer-reviewed chapter to Social Christianity in Scotland and Beyond, 1800-2000 (Ed. Andrew Kloes, Laura Mair, 2024).
Project title: Scotland’s Forgotten Women: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Magdalene Asylums and Mother & Baby Homes, 1900-1985
Jo Thor’s project at IASH explores Salvation Army Mother and Baby Homes in twentieth-century Scotland. It aims to determine their character, goals and the conceptualisation of their clients, who were mostly unmarried mothers. It will examine the evolution of these residential facilities and their interactions with, and connections to changing attitudes towards ‘deviant’ women. In doing so, the study will pay close attention to the history of Scottish Magdalene asylums and a wider category of rescue homes for ‘fallen’ women. One of the aims of the project is to explore of the use of AI and conventional programming to process archival sources and generate statistics for selected Salvation Army records including manuscripts.
You can reach me at jthor2@ed.ac.uk and jo.anouk.thor@gmail.com.