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On Feb. 21, the third installment of the College's "Inside the Academics Studio" series featured
Cynthia Herrup, professor of history and law, interviewed by historian Peter Mancall. Herrup and Mancall discussed the study of journalism as preparation for a career as a historian, why academic writing should be accessible and how a book can bloom from frustration with another project.

Herrup writes on the relationship of law — particularly criminal law — and culture in early-modern English societies, as well as on the history of gender and sexuality. Her first book, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1989), explored how communities working without lawyers made decisions about law enforcement. Her second, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law and the Trial of the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford University Press, 2001), used a notorious trial to explore how law reflected tensions between genders and generations.

Peter Mancall, director the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, is an expert on early America, the early modern Atlantic world and early Native American history. His books include Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (Yale University Press, 2007) and At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).