Dr David Kennerley

I am a historian of modern Britain with a particular interest in the social, cultural and political significance of sound and music in the past. My work thus far has focused in particular on sonic aspects of gender and of political culture in the long nineteenth century. My teaching covers British, European and World history from the late seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, as well as Approaches and Disciplines.

Research Interests

The thread that connects my diverse research interests is a preoccupation with sounds, and their social, cultural, and political meanings, in the past. My work addresses the methodological challenge of studying a phenomenon that had an undoubted impact upon people in the past - and thus is essential to consider if we hope to explore fully the dynamics of past societies - but which, given its evanescent nature, is no longer available for the historian to study directly in the manner of printed, visual, or material sources. Drawing on insights from musicology, sound studies, and sensory history, I am especially interested in the ways in which a focus on how people interacted with the soundscape around them and their own sound- and music-making illuminates aspects of material, bodily and social experiences less readily accessible from more conventional sources and approaches. My first book, Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780-1850 (New York: OUP, 2020) explored the conflicting meanings contemporaries ascribed to the sounds of women's voices in musical culture, revealing the complex entanglement of female vocality with class, religious, national and gender identity. I am currently completing a book on sound and music in the Chartist movement, which examines the role of sonic experiences in shaping Chartist politics and identity, the challenge Chartist sounds - especially the collective voice of the crowd - offered within the Victorian soundscape, and the wider debates about the oral/aural dynamics of political communication during a crucial phase in the evolution of British democracy.