Ruby Ray Daily is a historian of Modern Britain and the British Empire, with a specialization in the history of sexuality and culture. Her book manuscript (Voluptuous Cruelty: Sex and Violence in Modern Britain) tracks the fluctuating relationship between sex and violence over the 19th and 20th centuries, using a wide variety of archival sources—popular media, colonial records, pamphlets, unpublished memoirs, letters, diaries, and art—to build up a geological map of seismic shifts in sexual culture. This research was funded by grants from Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin, and the Kinsey Institute, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the North American Conference on British Studies.
Her second project is a cultural history of advice and the modern advice industry. Before joining the faculty at the University of Arkansas, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University’s Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.
