Obituary: Janet Roebuck, academic

Janet Roebuck, who has died at 76, was a miner’s daughter from Rotherham who became a scholar of modern English social history and professor emerita at the University of New Mexico.

Specialising in industrial society, social welfare, and urban development in 19th century London, she was the first woman to chair the university’s department of history and its first female senior administrator.

It was an unlikely path for someone from a family home with no electricity and no hot water.

“My father was a coal miner, and coal mines were very much a part of my young life,” she would recall of her upbringing in a house with a toilet that was shared with the family at the end of the row.

But her parents, Ernest and Olive (née Dean), got her through high school and then into the University of Wales, from where she graduated in 1964, the first of her family to do so. By the age of 25 she had earned a PhD.

In the summer of 1968, having completed her doctorate at the University of London, she arrived in New Mexico, having borrowed money for the air fare and with a view to staying for a year.

But after being hired by the university, she quickly became “hooked on the desert” and found a home there. In rapid succession, she published three significant studies on the development of industrial society in England, with a smooth-flowing narrative that chronicled the changes in English urban society. 

She also established a reputation as an advocate for faculty rights and governance. She was successively president of the faculty Senate, and chair of the department of history.

In 1988, she bridled at the assertion by a senior administrator that there were “no women on this campus with the qualifications and experience to support their being moved into positions of higher administration” and led a campaign for women to be considered equal to their male colleagues.

In 1986, she was appointed interim vice president for academic affairs. Three years later, she was named associate vice president, serving in that position until her retirement in 1999. 

She is survived by a cousin in Rawmarsh, near Rotherham.