Professor Kate Fisher

My pronouns are she/her

I am a social and cultural historian, and I am especially interested in supervising students in the following areas:

• History of Sex and Sexuality
• Queer History
• History of relationships, emotions, friendships, and families including queer and trans lives
• History of pregnancy, birth, fertility, birth control, contraception and abortion
• History of sexology, sexual science and sexual health.
• Oral History and memory
• Medical Humanities
• Uses of the Past, Reception and Historiography
• Sexuality and Relationship education.
• Engaged research, public history, creative, collaborative, co-productive and participatory methodologies.
• Oral History
• Medical Humanities
• Uses of the Past, Reception and Historiography

My research focuses on the history of sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

My first book, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918-1960, won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in 2007 and my second book, co-written with Professor Simon Szreter of the University of Cambridge, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, was named Guardian Book of the Week in 2011. You can hear me discuss the book on Radio Four’s Thinking Allowed.

In 2015 Rebecca and I launched the interdisciplinary Sexual Knowledge Unit, which we co-direct with Professor Jana Funke and Dr Ina Linge, to bring together scholars from across the humanities, social sciences and biomedical sciences who are engaged in research about sex, gender and sexuality.

I am involved in a number of major projects.

1. Rethinking Sexology (with a Jana Funke): a Wellcome Trust funded project which seeks to explore the cross-disciplinary exchange between medical and non-medical forms of knowledge at the heart of early sexual science. You can find out more on the project website. The project tweets @sciencesofsex

2.Sex and History (with Rebecca Langlands): an award-winning and innovative approach to improving young people’s well-being and sexual health which uses objects and historical material from past cultures as a stimulus for discussing sex and relationships. We tweet @sexandhistory

3. HOLD (with Rebecca Langlands): a Plymouth-based community museum/art gallery project in collaboration with Effervescent (a dynamic arts company). Visit the project web pages.

4. Adventures in Time and Gender (with Gendered Intelligence): a drama podcast written and performed by young trans people and trans artists, and a series of creative works devised in response to historical material relating to the history of gender, sexuality and science. Visit the project web pages.

5. More Adventures (with Amanda Middleton): a therapeutic resource to support conversations about gender, building on the material developed for Adventures in Time and Gender. See the cards here.

Research supervision:

I supervise projects in modern social and cultural history, the medical humanities, gender and sexuality in nineteenth and twentieth century British culture, the history of birth control and contraception, sexology or sexual science, the history of sex and sexuality, memory and oral history, and the reception of the past in relation to sex and the erotic. I particularly welcome proposals relating to:

• The history of family life
• The history of birth control and contraception
• The development of sexual science and the medicalization of sex
• LGBTQ+ history
• The history of sexual knowledge
• The history of sex education
• The history of sex reform or sexual politics
• The history of pornography and erotic collections
• Sex and museums
• Modern sexual identities and the (classical) past
• Anthropology and the history of sexuality
• Oral history methodologies in the history of gender, sex and sexuality
• The politics of history in feminist queer and trans studies