The University of Sheffield
Department of History

Dr. Karen Harvey, B.A. (Manc.), M.A., Ph.D. (Lond.)

Senior Lecturer in Cultural History [Cultural History of the long 18th century; gender, the body & the domestic interior]

[On research leave, semester 2 2011-12]

Photo of Dr. Karen Harvey

Email: k.harvey@sheffield.ac.uk
Room: Jessop West: 2.13 | Telephone: (0114) 22 22605
Office Hours, Spring 2011-12: On Research Leave

Biography

Karen Harvey read Politics and Modern History at Manchester University, before moving to Royal Holloway, University of London where she gained an MA in Women's History and later her PhD. She subsequently worked on the project 'Women, Work and the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1840' at Manchester University, was then appointed to the AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (at the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Royal Holloway), before joining the history department in 2003. Karen has held fellowships at the Clark Library, UCLA and the Huntington Library. Since joining the department in 2003, Karen has sought to establish interdisciplinary research links within the University and Sheffield. She co-organized the conference 'Domesticity' in 2007, is a founder member of the Sheffield Materializing Culture Research Network, is part of the Eigheenth-Century Research Group, and is currently Academic in Residence at Bank Street Arts. Karen was awarded a Senate Award for Excellence in Learning and Teaching in 2007.

 

Research

Current Research
Karen has just completed a cultural history of men and the house. This reconstructs men’s experiences of the house, examining the authority that accrued to mundane and everyday household practices and employing men’s own concepts to understand what men thought and felt about their domestic lives. The study will be published with Oxford University Press in 2012. Alongside this project – which drew on men’s everyday domestic manuscripts – Karen has been developing an interest in the connections between space, manuscript practices and print, examined in a case-study of Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. This interest prompted Karen to become the first Academic in Residence at Bank Street Arts, housed in a row of late-Georgian buildings. Karen also continues to work on the body, material culture and masculinity, and other work in progress explores men's legs, dance and clothing, and drinking objects and politics. Karen is also participating in collaborative projects on the art and design of industry and the history of sex education through print.

Research Interests
Karen is a cultural historian of the British long eighteenth century, with a special interest in gender. She uses a wide range of written, visual and material sources in her research, and similarly employs a number of different approaches. She is committed to interdisciplinarity, exemplified by her role in the network 'Materializing Culture', and the conferences on Home Life and Domesticity. A particular interest in the body and sexuality led her to write an account of the erotic culture of the eighteenth century, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and to edit The Kiss in History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). She has ongoing research interests in masculinity, print culture (both visual and textual), material culture, and what might be termed the rather more 'impolite' aspects of the eighteenth century. Karen also has an interest in contemporary representations - both historiographical and popular - of the eighteenth-century past, including those in films and museums.

Knowledge Exchange
Karen represented the department on the University's Social Science Knowledge Exchange Forum. In 2007 she won a University of Sheffield 'Knowledge Transfer Opportunities Fund' grant, supported by the Higher Education Innovation Fund, for the project 'Displaying Drink: Ritual at the Eighteenth-Century Table'. For more information on the project, and on the resulting display at Museums Sheffield, see the link under 'Projects' opposite'. Karen is currently Academic in Residence at Bank Street Arts, in Sheffield, until June 2012. During the Residency she will explore her completed research on men and the house in the context of these Georgian domestic spaces and alongside artists working in a range of media. She will explore new ways to communicate her research, but also explore how the model of the ‘Academic in Residence’ might move the academy past the more conventional models of academic consultancy or knowledge transfer.

Research Supervision
Karen welcomes postgraduate students working on any aspect of cultural or social history from 1650 to 1850, and particularly those interested in gender, sexuality, material culture, the domestic interior and popular representations of the early modern.

Current PhD Students:

 

Administrative Roles and Responsibilities

Karen has served as a member of many of the department's committees, and has been involved in the planning of teaching at all levels. Outside the Department, Karen has been a member of the Arts Faculty Board, the Faculty of Arts Learning and Teaching Quality Committee and the Social Science Knowledge Transfer Forum. Amongst her current responsibilities, Karen is Director of MA Programmes and Impact Officer in the History Department. She is also an Assistant Faculty Director of Learning and Teaching, with responsibility for Student Affairs.

 

Selected Publications
Books/Special Issues

 

Chapters/Articles