Keith Snell
Keith David Malcolm Snell, FRAI, is an Anglo-Welsh academic historian who holds a personal chair as Professor of Rural and Cultural History at the University of Leicester. He was born in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and brought up in rural Wales and many tropical African countries, notably Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, and Nigeria.
Career
Keith Snell studied history at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) first-class degree. He remained at the University of Cambridge and, with funding from the Social Science Research Council, completed his doctoral studies at Trinity Hall as well. His Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), supervised by Professor Sir Tony Wrigley at The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, was awarded in 1979.[1]
Snell was then appointed Research Fellow in the Humanities at King's College, Cambridge, 1979-1983, before taking up a lectureship in the Department of Economics and Related Studies at the University of York. Snell then moved to the University of Leicester as Lecturer in Regional Popular Cultures in the University's postgraduate Department of English Local History; he was subsequently promoted to Reader and from 2002 Professor of Rural and Cultural History.[1] He was Director of the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester, 2009-2018, when he took early retirement. He has supervised 92 PhD students.
In 1991, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.[1]
Research
K.D.M. Snell's research is on the social and economic history of modern Britain (1650-2020), including the poor law system and the history of welfare, migration and settlement law, rural history, the history of the community, the history of the family in Britain, the regional novel in Britain and Ireland, the Irish famine, Victorian English and Welsh religion, churchyards and cemeteries, motifs and styles of memorialization, the history of loneliness, and industrialization and folk art.
His work stresses the relevance of history for present concerns, and uses archival and other sources for new and different ends. He is especially associated with arguments for wider historical meanings and criteria affecting the quality of life; for the historical and geographical diversity of regional cultures in Britain and Ireland, notably focusing upon religion and regional fiction; for the enduring administrative and cultural features of localism and the parish well into British industrialization; and concerning the changing nature of ‘community’, migration, personal isolation and lone-living over the past three centuries. It is characterised methodologically by high levels of quantification coupled with extensive cultural, literary and qualitative evidence.
He is co-founder and co-editor (from 1990) of the Cambridge University Press journal Rural History: Economy, Society and Culture. He has published over 80 academic articles, and his published books include:[1]
Books
- Spirits of Community: English Senses of Belonging and Loss, 1750–2000 (Bloomsbury, 2016)
- Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
- (co-editor) Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600–1850 (Boydell & Brewer, 2004)
- The Bibliography of Regional Fiction in Britain and Ireland, 1800–2000 (Ashgate, 2002)
- Rival Jerusalems: the Geography of Victorian Religion (with Paul S. Ell), (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
- (editor) The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
- Edition of Alexander Somerville, Letters from Ireland During the Famine of 1847 (Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1994). Translated into German as Irlands Grosser Hunger: Briefe und Reportagen aus Irland Während der Hungersnot 1847 (Unvast-Verlag, Munster, 1996).
- Church and Chapel in the North Midlands: Religious Observance in the Nineteenth Century (Leicester University Press, 1991)
- Edition of Alexander Somerville, The Whistler at the Plough: Containing Travels, Statistics and Descriptions of Scenery and Agricultural Customs in Most Parts of England (London, 1989).
- Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1985). Winner of the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize; New Society book of the year.
References
- "Professor Keith Snell", University of Leicester. Retrieved 14 August 2017.