Serena Dyer

Dr Serena Dyer is a historian of women, consumption, and material culture in the eighteenth century. She has previously taught at the University of Warwick and University of York, and joined the University of Hertfordshire in 2018. Serena also has a background in museums, and was Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture and Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery.

Her research focuses on material lteracy and consumer knowledge in the eighteenth century. She was awarded her ESRC funded PhD at the University of Warwick in 2016, and she is currently completing a monograph entitiled Material Lives: Women, Consumption, and Material Culture, 1750-1820, for which she has received funding from the Paul Mellon Centre. She has also published papers in History Compass, the Journal of Urban History, and Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, as well as numerous edited collections. Her new research project focusses on nationhood and material culture, and examines how material objects were used to mediate new ideas of Britishness following the 1707 Acts of Union. 

• Women and gender
• Material culture
• Nationhood and Britishness
• Shopping and consumers
• Making and production
• Fashion, dress, and textiles

In 2018/2019 Serena teaches on the following undergraduate modules:

• Belief and Disbelief: Faith, Magic, and Medicine, 1500-1800
• Maladies and Medicine in Early Modern Europe
• Bodies and Sexualities in the early modern Era

And on the following MA modules:

• Money-Makers, Murders, Medics, and Mothers: Women's Lives in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries