She left UEA in 2023 and is now Professor of modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London.

Griffin's early work grew out of her 2000 Cambridge University PhD looking at popular recreation in Britain during the long eighteenth century.

A History of Hunting in Britain (Yale University Press, 2007)[5] Source:[6] In the 2010s, Griffin's work moved away from popular culture and started to focus on the British Industrial Revolution.

In 2013, she published Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution (Yale University Press, 2013), in which she turned attention away from the causes and timing of the Industrial Revolution to focus on the impact of industrialisation on the lives and standards of living of ordinary people.

In this she made the observation that writing about the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution has become increasingly dominated by the field of Economic history.

In this way, she argued that traditional economic history methods are not sensitive enough to pick up the reality and complexity of living standards at the individual level.