Dr Miskell studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate student at the University of Wales Aberystwyth and subsequently held a three-year postdoctoral research post at the University of Dundee.  She joined the Swansea History Department (now History and Classics) in September 2000, was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2007, and became Head of Department at the beginning of 2009. 

Dr Miskell is a member of the Centre for the History of Wales and its Borderlands.

Current research

Dr Miskell's research interests lie in the field of nineteenth-century British urban history, with a particular focus on social and cultural developments in Welsh industrial towns and the experience of migrant groups therein. Following her study of Swansea in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, she is currently pursuing work on the learned associations of Victorian Britain, on the ports and resorts of the Bristol Channel, and on the early copper-smelting industry of Swansea.

Principal Publications

Books and journals

• 'Intelligent Town ': An Urban History of Swansea, 1780-1855 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006)
• (ed., with Peter Borsay and Owen Roberts), Urban History, 32.1; special issue on Welsh towns
• (ed., with Christopher A. Whatley & Bob Harris), Victorian Dundee: Image and Realities (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000)

Book-chapters and journal articles

• 'Urban Power, Industrialisation and Political Resource: Swansea Elites in the Town and Region, 1780-1850', in R. Roth & R. Beachy (eds.), Who ran the cities? City Elites and Urban Power-Structures in Europe and North America, 1750-1940 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 21-36
• 'Operating in the Ethnic Sphere: Irish Migrant Networks and the Question of Respectability in Nineteenth-Century South Wales', Immigrants and Minorities, 23 (2005), 233-253; reprinted in E. Delany & D. MacRaild (eds.), Irish Migration, Networks and Ethnic Identities since 1750 (London: Routledge, 2007), 87-107
• 'The Making of a New "Welsh Metropolis": Science, Leisure and Industry in Early Nineteenth-Century Swansea', History, 88 (2003), 32-52
• 'Reassessing the anti-Irish riot: popular protest and the Irish in south Wales, c.1826-1882', in P. O'Leary (ed.), Irish Migrants in Modern Wales (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 101-18
• 'Informal Arrangements: Irish Associational Culture and the Immigrant Household in Industrial South Wales', in J. Belchem & K. Tenfelde (eds.). Polish and Irish Migration in Comparative Perspective (Essen: Klartext, 2003), 109-120
• ‘The heroic Irish doctor. Irish immigrants in the medical profession in nineteenth century Wales’, in O. Walsh (ed.), Ireland Abroad. Politics and Professions in the nineteenth century (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), 82-94
• 'From Conflict to Co-operation. Urban Improvement and the case of Dundee, 1790-1850', Urban History 29 (2002), 350-371
• 'Separate Spheres? Re-thinking the history of the metalliferous industries in south Wales', Welsh History Review, 21 (2002), 249-270
• 'Civic leadership and the manufacturing elite: Dundee, 1820-1870', in L. Miskell, C. A. Whatley, & B. Harris (eds.), Victorian Dundee: Image and Realities (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 51-69
• 'Irish Immigrants in Cornwall: the Camborne experience, 1861-1882', in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds.) The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999), 31-51
• (with C. A. Whatley), 'Juteopolis in the Making. Linen and the Industrial Transformation of Dundee, c.1820-1850', Textile History, 30 (1999), 176-198

Principal research awards, fellowships, and prizes

• AHRC collaborative doctoral award (with the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea), for Shipowners in maritime and urban life, 2008-
• Dyos Prize for Urban History, for 'From Conflict to Co-operation. Urban Improvement and the case of Dundee, 1790-1850', Urban History 29 (2002), 350-371