Betty Wood obituary

My friend and mentor Betty Wood, who has died of cancer aged 76, was a Cambridge academic and a historian of the study of slavery, gender, and religion in the Atlantic world. She was among the first to study enslaved people, and specifically enslaved women, at an elite UK university and was instrumental in building the profile of early American history in the UK.

Born in Melton Constable, Norfolk, the daughter of Marjorie (nee Green) and Stanley Wood, a railway guard, she was educated at grammar schools in Fakenham and Scunthorpe and became the first in her family to attend university, studying geography at Keele. Graduating in 1967, the following year she took a master's in social and economic history at the London School of Economics.