The mistakes led to questions about how they were missed by Wolf’s supervisor and examiners, but her dissertation remained under embargo for six years after being examined in April 2015.
It was finally published this month on Oxford’s online research archive, alongside nine pages of corrections that address Wolf’s misreading of criminal records and cite several texts that contradict claims that the mid- to late Victorian period saw an escalation of Britain’s persecution of gay men. But the release does not reveal who examined the thesis.
Tim Hitchcock, professor of digital history at the University of Sussex, whose digital archive the Old Bailey Online contained the records misunderstood by Wolf, said the episode represented a “failure of supervision and examining.” He suggested that the unnamed examiners may have had backgrounds in English literature rather than legal history.