Dr Mari Takayanagi 

Dr Mari Takayanagi is Senior Archivist at the UK Parliamentary Archives. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association, and an Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway University of London. During Michaelmas term 2024 she is an Archives By-Fellow at Churchill College Cambridge, researching women, Parliament and politics, c.1918-1945. She is grateful to the Churchill Fellowship for awarding her the By-Fellowship Annual Grant, and to the Parliamentary Archives for granting her a career break.

Mari is a historian of women and Parliament from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Her research interests include legislation affecting women’s lives and gender equality, early women MPs, and women staff in the House of Commons and House of Lords. Her most recent publications are ‘Suffrage Centenaries’ in the Routledge Companion to British Women’s Suffrage (Routledge, 2024), and as co-editor with Erika Rackley and Rosemary Auchmuty, Women’s Legal Landmarks in the Interwar Years (Hart Publishing, 2024). Her monograph, Necessary Women: the Untold Story of Parliament’s Working Women, co-authored with Elizabeth Hallam Smith, was published in 2023 by The History Press.