Matilda Hatcher is a PhD candidate in the School of History. Her research focuses on men and masculinity in the British Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. She is currently undertaking a history of emotion, unpacking the interactions between masculine ideals and sailors’ lived experiences of combat through the lens of emotions. Through this project she seeks to illuminate the displays of men’s wartime emotions in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Her Honours thesis, which was awarded the Mick Williams Prize in History, focussed on war-related disability, examining British naval manliness and impaired bodies in visual culture during the French Wars.

Matilda is an editor of the ANU Historical Journal II.