Dr Jeannette Strickland BA MA PhD

Research Overview

Current research:
Developing my thesis into a book. I am researching two new areas: firstly, Lever Brothers' use of an advertising agency in America at a time when all the company's UK, European and empire marketing was created in-house. My doctoral research was based, primarily, on Lever's correspondence held by Unilever Archives in the UK as access to the company's archives in America is not permitted. Receiving a grant to study the J Walter Thompson archive will give me the opportunity to develop a new dimension to Lever Brothers approach to marketing. Secondly, as a result of the work I did for a Swiss film about early cinematography, I have been granted access to a cache of correspondence between William Lever and his Swiss filmmaker, not previously studied by English-speaking researchers, that will add to the study of Lever Brothers' early use of cinematography as a promotional tool.
I am writing a white paper for the Association of Business Historians of the impact of Covid-19 on business archives and, as a consequence, on academic research.
I continue to research window dressing, and the role of women in particular, with a view to writing an article and I have started to research works' outings and, in particular, the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in 1924, using Boots, Unilever and Pullars of Perth as case studies.

Grants:
Received an award from the Dixon Fund in 2019 to enable me to attend the Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing in Ottawa and present a paper on Lever Brothers and early cinematography, which was developed into an article that was published in Business History.
Awarded a John Furr Fellowship, a research travel grant, by the David M Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, North Carolina, to examine the archives of the J Walter Thompson advertising agency, which I will use in 2023 to study Lever Brothers' marketing strategy in America for my book.