Chief Executive
Katie Childs
Katie joined Chawton House as Chief Executive in February 2019. Her role is to lead the organisation and she has overall responsibility for the strategic direction, operations, business development and public engagement in the House, collection and historic estate. With a talented staff and volunteer team, Katie is leading the delivery of Transforming Chawton House, the Masterplan to evolve Chawton House into an inspiring and sustainable historic estate that tells the story of the Knight family and brings early women’s writing to life.
Katie joined Chawton House from the Imperial War Museums, where she led the First World War Centenary commemorations, managed large events, and established a new Second World War and Holocaust partnership programme and the War and Conflict Subject Specialist Network, all as part of her role as Head of Partnerships and Strategic Relations. Katie came to IWM following five years at the National Museum Directors’ Council where she led policy development and projects that resulted in improvements in Government support for museums and much more effective cooperation across the museum sector. At the British Museum, Katie negotiated the loan of 90 Afghan treasures that had been hidden from the Taliban, developed museum partnerships in India and East and West Africa, ran the World Collections Programme, and worked with the British Army to safeguard cultural heritage in Iraq.
Katie is a graduate of Girton College, University of Cambridge, and a Trustee of Ely Museum and the Collections Trust. When not working, Katie is usually found watching Manchester United or the cricket, walking, cooking, clearing her overgrown garden, or on the train to her home town of Bolton.
Board of Trustees
Chair – Louise Ansdell
Simon Knight
Simon Knight is a Chartered Surveyor who specialises in estate management and was a partner of Smiths Gore for 30 years and Senior Partner from 1996-2014. He is currently a Director of Savills in their rural division. He became a Trustee of Chawton House in October 2017. He is also a Trustee of a number of family trusts and charities – Chairman of Governors of St Mary’s School – Calne, Vice-Chairman of Sussex Heritage Trust, Trustee of the Weald and Downland Museum and a Trustee of Impact Initiatives. He is a Deputy Lieutenant of West Sussex and served as High Sheriff of the county in 2009/10. He lives near Petworth in West Sussex.
Anne McMeehan Roberts
Anne McMeehan Roberts is a Trustee at Paines Plough (touring “new theatre to all four corners of the UK and around the world”), as well as Chair of Portsmouth High School’s governing body – she was previously a pupil there leaving in 1972 to study European Languages, Politics and Economics at Loughborough University. Most of her career has been spent working in the City, latterly running a specialist communications firm, of which she was a founding director. Prior to this her appointments included Director of Communications of the investment funds industry’s trade association and director of Framlington Group and Managing Director of its unit trust subsidiary. She won the Network Award for Business Woman of the Year in Finance in 1992.
Sue Saville
Professor Ros Ballaster
Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Faculty of English, Oxford University and Professorial Fellow of English at Mansfield College, Oxford. She first visited Chawton House Library in 2003 and has been an enthusiastic visitor to exhibitions and conferences since, seeing many of her graduate and postdoctoral students benefit from opportunities to visit and study here. She has published widely in the field of eighteenth-century literature and has particular research interests in women’s writing, women’s studies, feminist theory, and oriental fiction. She is the editor of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for Penguin Classics (1991) and The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690 – 1750: Volume Four (History of British Women’s Writing (2010) . Her major monographs are: Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684-1740 (1992); Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (2005); Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2020). She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Anne Lister Society, and the Advisory Board of the Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online project, and also a Trustee of Mansfield College, University of Oxford.
Joanna Barker
Joanna Barker read French at Durham University and has honorary doctorates from Durham and Oxford Brookes. She had a career in finance, and is now engaged entirely in the non-profit sector, with an emphasis on literature, arts and music. She has published two books on women in the eighteenth century, both published by the Modern Humanities Research Association: In Defence of Women and The Pen and the Needle. She is a trustee and senior editor of Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online.
Ailsa Grant Ferguson
Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson is a literary historian, focusing across Shakespeare, 17th century women’s writing and their afterlives in 20th and 21st century context. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a recent AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellow). She is Principal Lecturer in Literature at the University of Brighton, where she leads the Medical Humanities Research and Enterprise Group. She has worked closely with a range of arts and heritage organisations including Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the National Theatre. Ailsa grew up in Alton and now lives in Selborne.
Clare Clinton
Clare Clinton is the Arts, Heritage & Learning Manager at West Horsley Place. This historic house and estate has a mission to have community engagement and learning at the heart of its offer. Clare has developed learning and volunteer programmes with a focus on finding ways that the estate can benefit and attract its local community and wider audiences. Clare is passionate about enabling more ways for people to access, learn, be creative and feel comfortable in historic houses. Before moving into heritage, Clare worked at Christie’s and various art dealers. In 2009 she wrote Metamorphosis not Metaphor, a retrospective on the work of Donald Hamilton Fraser RA, published by Lund Humphries. Clare graduated from the University of St. Andrews with an MA in History and History of Art. She sits on the Historic Houses Learning Advisory Panel.
JC Crissey
JC Crissey is a management consultant, non-executive director, and serving Hampshire Magistrate. He is also a former Town Councillor and Mayor of Petersfield (2024–2025), roles he assumed following a long career as an executive and academic in marketing. He holds a BBA in Management, an MBA in Marketing and Finance, and a PhD in Media Economics. JC is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and a Life Member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Patrons
Founding Patron, Dr Sandy Lerner OBE
Dame Mary Fagan, DCVO JP
Professor Isobel Grundy
Mr Nigel Humphreys
Mrs Gilly Drummond OBE DL
Mrs June Parkinson
Professor Michèle Roberts
Mr Alan Titchmarsh, MBE VMH DL
Ms Claire Tomalin, FRSL
Professor Janet Todd
Joanna Trollope, OBE
Professor Richard Ovenden
Karen O’Brien