Professor of Economic and Social History

Contact Details

I obtained a BA (Hons) in Economic and Social History from the University of Kent and a PhD in historical demography from the University of Liverpool. I am a member of the ESRC Peer Review Panel, edit the journal Family and Community History, and am a former winner of the Pasold Prize for research into textile history. 

In 2012 I was appointed as Director of the University of Leicester Centre for Medical Humanities.

Research  

• Research Interests
• Publications

PhD Supervision

I supervise across a wide thematic, spatial and chronological range. Previous PhD completions have included studies of medical networks in Bordeaux 1720-1790, medical education and the anatomy acts, Dickens and the death of childhood, London stay makers 1680-1810, domestic service in Lancashire, family provision of medical care in Georgian England and seven different regional studies of the operation of the Old or New Poor Laws. Current PhD students have topics ranging from ‘Annie Kenney and the twentieth-century suffrage movement’ or ‘Patient case records of the Royal Free Hospital, 1890-1919’, through studies of the economic and social development of individual towns, and to themes such as ‘Poverty and sickness in eighteenth and nineteenth century Hertfordshire'.

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

HS1010: Europe Reshaped 1815-1914

HS2000: Historical Research Methods

HS3675: Peopling the Industrial Revolution

Administrative Responsibilities

Director of Research for the School of Historical Studies

School Management Committee

School Research Committee

College Research Committee

Equal Opportunities Committee  

Most Recent Publications

1. S.A. King, 'Negotiating the law of poor relief in England, 1800-1840', History, 96 (2011), 410-35.
2. S.A. King, ‘Mr Killigan’s Empire: A medical man in Habsburg lands’, in D. Sechel (ed.), Medicine Within and Between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires (Bochum, 2011), 19-36.
3. S.A. King, ‘Welfare regimes and welfare regions in Britain and Europe, c.1750-1860’, Journal of Modern European History, 9 (2011), 44-67.
4. S.A.King, ‘The residential and familial arrangements of English pauper letter writers, 1800-1840s’, in J. McEwan and P. Sharpe (eds.), Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c.1600-1850 (Basingstoke, 2011), 145-68.