Ashleigh Percival-Borley

Ashleigh Percival-Borley is a military and gender historian and British Army veteran whose work explores how war is remembered, narrated, and lived, especially through the experiences of women. A former front-line combat medic and Sergeant with operational and training deployments to Afghanistan, Kenya, Italy, Austria, and across the UK. Her lived experience informs a deeply empathetic and critically engaged approach to historical research.

Ashleigh is completing a PhD in History, with a focus on oral history and cultural memory. She is a BBC Radio 4 New Generation Thinker and currently serves as Researcher in Residence for Free Thinking. Her academic and public work interrogates the emotional legacies of conflict, the silences surrounding women’s military service, and the myths that shape public memory.

Her research spans the cultural history of the Second World War to the present, and she has a particular interest in the intersections of gender, secrecy, and identity. Through both scholarship and storytelling, she works to uncover voices and perspectives too often excluded from dominant historical narratives.

Ashleigh has lectured for NATO, spoken at the National Intelligence History Conference, and delivered a TED Talk on the emotional legacy of being a woman soldier. She lives in the UK with her young daughter.