Head of School

Professor of Urban History

Contact Details

• Tel: +44 (0) 116 252 2592 or 2837
• Email: rhs4@le.ac.uk
• Office: Attenborough 710 
  or Room 14 Marc Fitch House, Salisbury Road
• Office Hours: Semester 2, Tuesday 11am-12pm, Wednesday 11am-12pm
• Dissertation Office Hour: Tuesday 4pm-5pm

Biography

I am a historian of eighteenth-century British urban and cultural history. I was brought up in Cambridge but moved to Oxford to study history as an undergraduate. I stayed there for my D.Phil on ‘The writing of urban history in eighteenth-century Britain’. After a year teaching at the University of Swansea I returned to Oxford to take up a junior research fellowship. In 1998 I joined the Department of Economic and Social History and I have been at Leicester ever since.    

Research

• Research Interests
• Publications

PhD Supervision

Early modern and eighteenth-century urban social and cultural history. 

Teaching

Undergraduate

• HS2231 Gender History
• HS3717/18 From Gin Lane to Westminster : politics, culture and society in the Age of Walpole (third year special subject)

Postgraduate

• Concepts in Urban History

• The Grand Tour and the country house (with MA in the Country House)

 Administrative Responsibilities

• Head of School
• Chair of the School Management Committee
• Chair of the Undergraduate Staff/Student Committee 
• Member of the School External Relations Sub-committee  

Most Recent Publications

1. 'Borough archives and the preservation of the past in 18th century towns' in Philip Genet (ed.), Du papier à  l'archive, du privé au public  (Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris, 2011), pp. 129-48.
2. ‘”The private and uninteresting history of a single town?”: Les histories des villes provincials dans l’Angleterre du xviii siècle’, Histoire urbaine, 28 (2010), pp. 85-103
3. ‘British perceptions of Italian cities in the long eighteenth century’, in Kazuhiko Kondo and Miles Taylor(eds), British History, 1600-2000: expansion in perspective (London, 2010), pp. 153-76.
4. Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Hambledon, 2004)