Claire Wrigley

PhD Candidate

Late Modern Europe

I am a historian of modern Europe, specializing in modern Britain and its empire. My dissertation, Family, Nation, Empire: An Imperial History of Public Housing in Britain, 1890-2017, argues that the law of public (council) housing was a domestic expression of the politics of empire and decolonization as it was designed to produce stable, productive working-class families who took a particular form, that of the white, heterosexual nuclear family. 

I am an occasional guest writer for the Social Housing Law Association, London, I have been a Scholar of Berkeley's Network for a New Political Economy since 2021 and I was the coordinator of the Berkeley-Stanford British Studies Reading Group from 2018 to 2020.


Research Interests

  • state formation
  • citizenship
  • imperialism and decolonization
  • politics
  • law

Select Fellowships and Awards

Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies Graduate Fellowship, 2023-24

George Guttridge Prize for British or American Colonial History, 2023

Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative Research Grant, 2023

North American Conference on British Studies Dissertation Fellowship, 2021-22

Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Graduate Prize, 2022

Berkeley Center for Race and Gender Research Grant, 2020