Projects per year
Personal profile
Biography
Prof Karen Sayer is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Fellow of the HEA. Her research focus is on the rural, that is conceptualisations of rural communities, landscapes and environments; human and animal relations in agricultural work and on the farm; labour in field, farm and home; the interior spaces of farmhouse and cottage, as represented, worked and lived.
Her contribution to the field began with Women of the Fields (MUP 1995) and includes Country Cottages: a Cultural History (MUP 2000), and with co-editors the edited collection Transforming the Countryside: the electrification of rural Britain (Routledge, 2017). She has most recently completed work on a Wellcome Trust National Collaborative Award with researchers in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Newcatle, Lincoln and Reading.
Within the Leeds Centre of Victorian Studies and its wider networks, she draws on material culture, illustration and text to work on Victorian social and cultural history of landscapes of marginal spaces and experiences, e.g. landscapes of water, rivers and coastlines, aesthetics of sight and sound, cultures of light and illumination.
She works closely with artists, heritage providers and museums at the national level such as the LastStation art project, the Museum of English Rural Life, and others in the region such as the Thackray Medical Museum. She has delivered public lectures to these and also the Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford, has been intervuiewed a number of times for BBC Radio 4, and has appeared on BBC TV on Wartime Farm and Who Do You Think You Are?
She has served as Chair of the British Agricultural History Society (founded 1952) and British representative to the European Rural History Organisation. In the USA, she has peer reviewed for and sat on the Board of the Agricultural History Society's journal Agricultural History, had the pleasure and privilege to serve on the Fite Committee, and was Chair of the Conference Committee for the 2022 Annual Meeting in Stavanger, Norway. She has recently completed three years serving on the American Society for Environmental History's Alice Hamilton Prize Committee.
She is currently the University Research Lead.
Research interests
Prof Sayer is currently working on a monograph for Routledge, Farm Animals in Britain, 1850-2001, an environmental and cultural history project focused on farming, which addresses the changing social spaces inhabited by the farmed animal. It addresses the cultural understanding and representation of the farmed animal, as well as farming methods, and the changing spaces of the farm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
With co-editors Paul Brassley and Jeremy Burchardt, she was a contributing editor to the peer-reviewed collection Transforming the Countryside: the electrification of rural Britain (Routledge, 2017). This addresses the infrastructure, promotion, value of and reponses to rural electrification in Britain, with comparative chapters on Canada and Sweden, and raises questions about the demand for, use and reception of electrification in rural communities, and by those determined to preserve Britain's rural heritage.
Reading the material culture of objects helds by the Thackray Medical museum, Leeds, she has collaborated on Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss, 1830-1950 (Palgrave, 2017) with Prof Graeme Gooday, Professor of the History of Science and Technology, School of Philosophy, Religion and History, at the University of Leeds. This addresses the circulation of knowledges about and definitions of adult 'deafness' in the Victorian period and twentieth-century Britain until just after the First World War, and seeks to recover the histories of those who experience hearing loss through the histories of those technologies supposed to 'correct' it.
Prof Sayer is a Senior Fellow of the HEA, and her research has included critical pedagogic work on issues of ‘race’ and diversity within history. She is the edior of the Practica section on wasy of teaching the nineteenth century in Advances in Nineteenth Century Studies (T&F).
Teaching and Administration
Service:
Department of Humanities: Research Lead History
School Of Arts and Communication Academic Member of University-level Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee
University Impact and Public Engagement Champion
Modules taught within BA (hons) History include:
Special Subject: Victorian Countryside
Presenting the Past: Public Histories and Popular Presentations of the Past
Dissertations and Research Reports
Modules taught within MA Victorian Studies include:
Nature and Environment
Dissertations and Research Reports
Education/Academic qualification
Doctor of Philosophy, University of Sussex
Award Date: 1 Jun 1992
Bachelor of Arts, Portsmouth Polytechnic
Award Date: 1 Jun 1988
External positions
External Examiner, University of Lincoln
1 Sept 2018 → 31 Aug 2020
External Examiner, Ba (Hons) History, Bath Spa University
1 Sept 2016 → 31 Aug 2020
External Examiner, MA Humanities, Nottingham Trent University
1 Sept 2016 → 31 Aug 2019
Keywords
- D History (General)
- Sustainability
- Agricultural history
- Environmental history
- Rural history
REF 2029 UOA
- UOA27 - English Language and Literature
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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
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FIELD: Thinking forward through the past: Linking science, social science and the humanities to inform the sustainable reduction of endemic disease in British livestock farming
Woods, A. (PI), Holloway, L. (CoPI), Kao, R. (CoPI), Hanley, N. (CoPI), Proctor, A. (CoPI) & Sayer, K. (CoPI)
3/09/18 → 31/08/23
Project: Research
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Towards agri-system thinking: an integrated approach to problems of modern livestock production
Sayer, K. (CoI) & Woods, A. (PI)
1/08/15 → 1/08/16
Project: Research
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Rural Boundaries: the control of rats and mice in British agriculture c. 1800-2001
Sayer, K. (PI)
1/09/14 → 31/08/15
Project: Research
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Vets as authority figures, knowledge brokers, coaches, and mentors: the changing role of farm vets in addressing endemic conditions in cattle and sheep
Sayer, K., Proctor, A., Woods, A., Holloway, L., Clark, B. & Mahon, N., 15 Jul 2024, (Accepted/In press) Vet Humanities. Skipper, A. & Gray, C. (eds.).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
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Cultivating community: women and agricultural fairs in Ontario. Jodey Nurse
Sayer, K., Sept 2023, In: Canadian Historical Review. 104, 3, p. 441-443 3 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Book/Film/Article review › peer-review
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Figuring the past: statistics as cultural artefacts in British agriculture from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century
Sayer, K., 31 Jul 2023, From breeding and feeding to medicalization: animal farming, veterinarization and consumers in the twentieth-century Western Europe. Lanero Taboas, D., Martiin, C., Fernandez Prieto, L. & Herment, L. (eds.). Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, p. 31-52 21 p.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
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Out of the reach of cattle? animal subjectivities shaping the electrical cultures of British livestock farming in the second half of the 20th century
Sayer, K., 14 Apr 2023, In: Journal of Energy History Revue d'Histoire de ''Energie. 8Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile48 Downloads (Pure) -
The view from the land, 1947-1968: 'modernity' in British agriculture, farm, and nation
Sayer, K., 8 Jun 2023, New lives, new landscapes revisited: : rural modernity in Britain. Kelly, M., Ross, L. M., Navickas, K. & Anderson, B. (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 156-181 25 p. (Proceedings of the British Academy).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Activities
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Rural History 2025
Sayer, K. (Chair)
9 Sept 2025 → 12 Sept 2025Activity: Attending or organising conference/seminar/workshop › Seminar/workshop
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Advances in Nineteenth Century Research (Journal)
Sayer, K. (Editorial board member)
15 Apr 2025 → …Activity: Publication peer review and editorial work › Editorial activity
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REF29 Pilot, UoA History Panel Member
Sayer, K. (Consultant)
19 Feb 2025 → 31 Jul 2025Activity: Consultancy
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Panel Member AHRC Curiosity Awards PAN951/OPP684
Sayer, K. (Consultant)
29 Jan 2025 → 30 Jan 2025Activity: Consultancy
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Livestock Housing: weather, health and welfare?
Sayer, K. (Chair)
10 Dec 2024 → 11 Dec 2024Activity: Invited talk/public lecture/debate
Press/Media
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Interviewed for James Wong's Alternative Country Garden on BBC Radio 4
15/09/16
1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Expert Comment