Addresses how academic historians engage with Downton Abbey and similar programmes on a personal, intellectual, and professional basis
As representations of history, period dramas perform serious work, and can be used to discuss both historical and contemporary issues (voting rights, war and trauma, reproductive rights). The contributors challenge the narrow view of period drama TV as conservative nostalgia; through sharing their experiences with these series (as consultants, bloggers and public speakers) they suggest ways in which historians can navigate the boundaries between academic and public history.
Key Features
. Gives personal accounts of the ways US historians have been publicly in work on one of the most talked-about television dramas
. Looks at Downton Abbey from historians' perspectives, not to challenge its historical accuracy but to explore how it works as popular history
. Explores the divide between public and academic history
. Brings together British and American historians to help us understand how British popular culture is used and consumed in different ways

Julie Anne Taddeo teaches British history at University of Maryland, College Park, USA. She is the author of Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity (Haworth, 2002); She has edited and co-edited the following collections: Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey (with James Leggott; Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (with Cynthia J. Miller, Scarecrow, 2012); Catherine Cookson Country: On the Borders of Legitimacy, Fiction and History (Ashgate 2012); The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV & History (with Ken Dvorak, University Press of Kentucky, 2009). She is an Associate Editor for The Journal of Popular Television (published by Intellect) and is Secretary of the Middle Atlantic Conference on British Studies (MACBS).

Introduction: Doing History in the Age of Downton Abbey
Julie Anne Taddeo

A (Very) Open Elite: Downton Abbey, Historical Fiction and America's Romance with the British Aristocracy
Nicoletta F. Gullace

Undoing Difference: Academic Historians and the Downton Abbey Audience
Charles Upchurch

Let's Talk about Sex: Period Drama Histories for the Twenty-first Century
Julie Anne Taddeo

Consuming Downton Abbey: The Commodification of Heritage and Nostalgia
Dina M. Copelman

Matthew's Legs and Thomas's Hand: Watching Downton Abbey as a First World War Historian
Jessica Meyer

'The new Downton Abbey'?: Poldark and the Presentation and Perception of an Eighteenth-Century Past
Hannah Greig