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  • Home
  • About Us
    • What we do
      • Research
      • Conference programme
    • Chief Executive, Trustees and Patrons
    • North American Friends
    • News
    • Privacy Policy
      • Stay in touch
  • The Library
    • Using the Library
    • Library collections
      • Women’s writing in English
        • Women writer biographies
        • Manuscripts in the collection [doc]
        • Yablon archive of Brontë ephemera [doc]
        • Novels Online
        • The Hampshire Chronicle
      • The Knight Collection
      • Man Up! online exhibition
        • Introduction
        • Soldiering
        • Pirating
        • Duelling
        • Landowning
        • Acting
        • Ballooning
        • Mary Wollstonecraft
        • George Sand
        • The Brontë Sisters
        • Man Up! podcast
        • Activities
    • Visiting Fellowships
    • Join our Reading Group
    • The Female Spectator
    • Library links
    • Forums
  • Visit
    • Visitor Information
    • Directions
    • Accommodation in the area
    • Stay in The North Wing
    • The House
    • The Gardens
    • Parkland
    • The Old Kitchen Tearoom
    • Group tours
    • Education
      • Tours
      • Workshops
      • Talks
      • Health and Safety
      • FAQs
  • What’s On
  • Venue Hire
  • Get Involved
    • Support Us
      • Donate
        • Card donation
        • Regular direct debit
        • Donate to NAFCH
      • Help Us Unbox Deirdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen Archive
      • North American Friends
    • Volunteering
    • Vacancies
  • Shop
    • Delivery Information
    • Returns Policy
    • My account
  • Home
  • About Us
    • What we do
      • Research
      • Conference programme
    • Chief Executive, Trustees and Patrons
    • North American Friends
    • News
    • Privacy Policy
      • Stay in touch
  • The Library
    • Using the Library
    • Library collections
      • Women’s writing in English
        • Women writer biographies
        • Manuscripts in the collection [doc]
        • Yablon archive of Brontë ephemera [doc]
        • Novels Online
        • The Hampshire Chronicle
      • The Knight Collection
      • Man Up! online exhibition
        • Introduction
        • Soldiering
        • Pirating
        • Duelling
        • Landowning
        • Acting
        • Ballooning
        • Mary Wollstonecraft
        • George Sand
        • The Brontë Sisters
        • Man Up! podcast
        • Activities
    • Visiting Fellowships
    • Join our Reading Group
    • The Female Spectator
    • Library links
    • Forums
  • Visit
    • Visitor Information
    • Directions
    • Accommodation in the area
    • Stay in The North Wing
    • The House
    • The Gardens
    • Parkland
    • The Old Kitchen Tearoom
    • Group tours
    • Education
      • Tours
      • Workshops
      • Talks
      • Health and Safety
      • FAQs
  • What’s On
  • Venue Hire
  • Get Involved
    • Support Us
      • Donate
        • Card donation
        • Regular direct debit
        • Donate to NAFCH
      • Help Us Unbox Deirdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen Archive
      • North American Friends
    • Volunteering
    • Vacancies
  • Shop
    • Delivery Information
    • Returns Policy
    • My account

Chief Executive, Trustees and Patrons

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Chief Executive, Trustees and PatronsNeil-BWT2025-05-15T11:31:06+01:00
  • Chief Executive

  • Trustees

  • Patrons

  • Chief Executive

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.

  • Trustees

Board of Trustees

Chair – Louise Ansdell

Louise Ansdell grew up in Hampshire close to Chawton.  She read Classics and English at Oxford, and then qualified as a barrister, practising family law. She is a specialist in financial cases.  She is also a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and sits as an arbitrator for financial cases on family breakdown.  She is a contributing editor of Butterworths Family Law encyclopaedia and Butterworths New Law Guide to International Adoption.  Louise governed preparatory and secondary schools for over 20 years.  Louise joined the Board at Chawton in March 2017 and was appointed its Chair at the end of that year.

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

Sue Saville has worked in the tourism and heritage sectors for over 40 years. Her roles have included Operations Director for the Princes Regeneration Trust, Managing Director of Tourism South East and Regional Director of the National Trust’s South East Region. Sue served as a founding Member of the South Downs National Park from 2010 until March 2018. Sue is currently Secretary to the Board of Trustees of The Dorneywood Trust, Buckinghamshire.

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

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

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