Dr Serena Dyer

Job: Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture

Faculty: Arts, Design and Humanities

School/department: School of Humanities

Address: De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH

T: 0116 2577415

E: serena.dyer@dmu.ac.uk

W: http://dmu.ac.uk/serenadyer

Social Media: www.serenadyer.co.uk

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Personal profile

Dr Serena Dyer is a historian of women, fashion, consumption, and material culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She was previously Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire, and has also taught at the University of Warwick, Middlesex University, and University of York. 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.

Serena's research focuses on histories of making, material literacy, and consumer knowledge in the eighteenth century. She was awarded her ESRC funded PhD at the University of Warwick in 2016. Her first book, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the Eighteenth Century, for which she has received support from the Paul Mellon Centre and the Pasold Research Fund, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.

Research group affiliations

Institute of History, Institute of Art and Design

Publications and outputs

Making the Material Home: Consumption, Craft, and Gender in Domestic Spaces
Making the Material Home: Consumption, Craft, and Gender in Domestic Spaces Dyer, Serena The material culture of domestic life has habitually been gendered as feminine. The traditional narrative has painted women as home-makers and consumers, creating a comfortable domestic space, and conceiving of their work as that of a household manager, wife, and mother. However, this gendered binary has overshadowed the domestic craft skill displayed by men, and male contributions to the material life of the home. This chapter explores how both men and women made and crafted items for use in domestic space, and how these items were integrated into a wider culture of collaborative domestic consumption. Building on the work of Vickery, Sarti, and de Vries, this chapter will engage with the corpus of material goods purchased for and produced in eighteenth-century English households. From embroideries and furniture, to wooden figures and shell crafts, both men and women actively engaged in the production of the material goods which filled the home, and in overseeing and managing the bespoke production of items they consumed. This chapter will begin with an examination of the domestic consumption of Sir Rowland and Lady Sabine Winn of Nostell Priory in Yorkshire, as they renovated the interior of their house in the 1760s. From Chippendale furniture to Lady Winn’s handcrafted adorned prints, the interiors of Nostell contained a full range of consumed and crafted goods. The dynamics of the material culture of this grand domestic space existed between fashionable finery and creative craft, as both husband and wife engaged in a collaborative process of domestic design. Captured in correspondence between the couple, and from tradespeople, as well as the preserved interiors, Nostell demonstrates the collaborative creation of a joint domestic material culture. The chapter will then expand to consider a broader array of collaborative partnerships during the creation of domestic spaces. The letters and accounts of couples setting up and maintaining home in eighteenth-century England will be examined, painting a picture of the socio-economic spread of couples’ collaborative homemaking. Both genders will be shown to have actively participated in the production of domestic material culture, countering the consumer (female) and producer (male) binary, prevalent in scholarship. It was together that these couples consumed and crafted domestic items, making the material home together. Dyer, S. (2021) Making the Material Home: Consumption, Craft, and Gender in Domestic Spaces. In: Joachim Eibach and Margareth Lanzinger (eds.), The Domestic Sphere in Europe, 16th to 19th Century (London: Routledge 2020), pp. 218-234
Object in Focus. A Wallpaper Sandwich: Comfort in the Student Room in 19th-Century Cambridge
Object in Focus. A Wallpaper Sandwich: Comfort in the Student Room in 19th-Century Cambridge Dyer, Serena During renovations in the late 1990s, a ‘wallpaper sandwich’, made up of twelve preserved layers of wallpaper, was removed from the wall of a student room at Peterhouse College at the University of Cambridge. This sandwich, now in the collection of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture at Middlesex University, provides a tangible connection to the temporary domestic spaces created by the students at the college. Unique within the museum’s collections, these wallpapers were chosen, hung and lived with by generation after generation of students. The wallpapers salvaged from this discovery had been hung between 1795 and the twentieth century, and their designs are diverse. Together, these papers provide a microcosmic view of the tastes and domestic priorities of Cambridge students over two hundred years. Dyer, S. (2021) Object in Focus. A Wallpaper Sandwich: Comfort in the Student Room in 19th-Century Cambridge. In: Jon Stobart (ed.), The Comforts of Home in Western Europe, 1700-1900 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 208-213
‘Magnificent as Well as Singular’: Hester Thrale’s Polynesian Court Dress of 1781
‘Magnificent as Well as Singular’: Hester Thrale’s Polynesian Court Dress of 1781 Dyer, Serena In January 1781, Hester Thrale appeared at the court of George III wearing a court mantua which was at once described by the newspapers as elegant and vulgar. This remarkable gown materialized and anticipated the authorial identity which Thrale would later embody as an author, diarist, and literary hostess. The gown was of Thrale’s own invention, inspired by the Polynesian goods which brought back by Captain James Cook in 1780. This chapter argues that an interrogation of Thrale’s sartorial self-authorship can shed light on the literary authorial identity she would later construct. It focuses on the materiality and reception of Thrale’s 1781 court gown and considers the parallels between Thrale’s gown and her writing. Dyer, S. (2020) ‘Magnificent as Well as Singular’: Hester Thrale’s Polynesian Court Dress of 1781. In: Egan, G. (Ed.) Fashion and Authorship: Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century, London: Palgrave, pp.43-62.
State of the Field: Material Culture
State of the Field: Material Culture Dyer, Serena This article surveys the state of the field of material culture within the discipline of history. The study of material culture – the myriad layers of cultural meaning embedded within objects – has been adopted by historians from colleagues in anthropology, archaeology and museum studies, and continues to thrive as an interdisciplinary field in tandem with art history and literary studies. As inventive digital and embodied methodologies within material culture begin to shape the future of the field, this article takes the opportunity to reflect upon the opportunities and impediments presented to scholars of material culture. It elucidates the diverse and often unfamiliar vernaculars of material objects, and reflects upon future directions in the study of material culture. open access article Dyer, S. (2021) State of the Field: Material Culture. History,
Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England
Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England Dyer, Serena Interest in the senses has blossomed over the last decade, leading to numerous explorations of touch, smell, sound, taste and sight throughout history. Increasingly, historians are considering how this sensory methodology can enrich other fields of historical study. This article explores the potential for sensory history to open new avenues of thought in the field of urban consumption history. Focusing on the period of the so called ‘consumer revolution’, this article promotes a reassessment of shopping in 18th‐century English towns. This intersection of consumption history and sensory history encourages us to rethink numerous aspects of the process of shopping in the 18th century, including browsing, gender, urban space and agency. This article begins by assessing the current state of scholarship in these two branches of historical enquiry, before considering how their juncture impacts research moving forward. The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. Dyer, S (2014) Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England. History Compass, 12 (9), pp. 694-703.
‘I Have Been a Collector of Costumes’: Women, Dress Histories and the Temporalities of Eighteenth-Century Fashion
‘I Have Been a Collector of Costumes’: Women, Dress Histories and the Temporalities of Eighteenth-Century Fashion Dyer, Serena By the early nineteenth century, the ‘costume book’ genre was well established as a catalogue of national habits. These chronologically, socially and geographically devised sartorial indexes to the world strove to use dress as a means of categorising and delineating humankind. Such publications espouse a sense of neat chronological evolution, situated within a framework of masculine progress. While the majority of published costume books from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were authored by men, this article explores the myriad ways in which women too constructed, subverted and engaged in sartorial histories. Published dress histories attempted to use dress as a means of constructing a coherent chronological narrative of a national heritage. Yet amateur women, such as Catherine Hutton, Mary White and Laetitia Powell, used pens, scissors, paste and needles to reach back through that time-tunnel, borrowing from and taking possession of the sartorial past. The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. Dyer, S. (2021) "I have been a collector of costumes”: Women, Dress Histories, and the Temporalities of 18th Century Fashion. History, 106, (372) pp. 578-596
Fashioning Consumers: Ackermann’s Repository of Arts and the Cultivation of the Female Consumer
Fashioning Consumers: Ackermann’s Repository of Arts and the Cultivation of the Female Consumer Dyer, Serena Serena Dyer argues that the Anglo-German Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics (1809–29) provides evidence of a decisive and conscious acknowledgement of the power of print to promote commerce and to establish the figure of the female consumer. In part through the fashion plate, periodicals were an indispensable tool for female readers looking to hone their economic skills and make spending decisions as responsible British subjects. Although it had wide interests, the Repository stands out for its patriotic promotion of British manufacture, prominently promoted through a series of woodcuts celebrating British manufacture and industry that framed actual fabric samples. Instead of simply encouraging a blind, novelty-based desire for the latest items, women’s periodicals such as the Repository acted to provide women with market knowledge, and to keep them commercially active. The women’s periodical aimed to mould women into urbane, economically dynamic, market-aware, discerning, and knowledgeable consumers. Dyer, S. (2018) Fashioning Consumers: Ackermann’s Repository of Arts and the Cultivation of the Female Consumer. In: J. Batchelor, J. and Powell, M.N. (eds.), Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain: 1690-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 474-487.
Barbara Johnson's Album: Material Literacy and Consumer Practice, 1746‐1823
Barbara Johnson's Album: Material Literacy and Consumer Practice, 1746‐1823 Dyer, Serena This article examines Barbara Johnson's Album, a prolific record of the dress consumption of a vicar's daughter. The album contains over a hundred samples of dress fabrics acquired by Johnson between the ages of eight and eighty‐five. Interrogated alongside the Johnson family correspondence and didactic tools produced by Johnson's mother, this article argues that the album acted as a material form of account book, conceived as a moral, financial and material regulator. Considered within the emerging framework of material knowledge and consumer skill, the album provides important evidence of how consumers maintained and developed their material literacy. The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. Dyer, S. (2019) Barbara Johnson's Album: Material Literacy and Consumer Practice, 1746‐1823. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys, and Learning to Shop in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys, and Learning to Shop in Eighteenth-Century Britain Dyer, Serena As consumers-in-training, active engagement with financial and material tasks were key didactic tools for eighteenth-century children. The expanding and tempting world of goods, which rose to ever-increasing prominence in the eighteenth century, brought with it a threat of moral decay, material decadence, and financial ruin. The importance of arming children in order to resist the allure of the commercial world was an issue of great importance to pedagogical writers such as Locke and Edgeworth, and was recognised as an appealing selling point by publishers such as Newbery and the Fullers. The didactic materials produced to promote the training of children to be economically literate, rational consumers were utilised with varying degrees of success. However, the material training of children to understand where things came from and how they were made was prevalent both in pedagogical literature, and in the practice of children making clothing for their dolls. This self-conscious development of children’s knowledge of the material world and consumer goods through unmaking and making aimed to promote restraint, and an understanding of the value of things. Dyer, S. (2018) Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys and Learning to Shop in 18th-Century Britain. In: Brandow-Faller, M. (ed.) Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-present., London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 31-45 .
Masculinities, Wallpaper, and Crafting Domestic Space within the University, 1795-1914
Masculinities, Wallpaper, and Crafting Domestic Space within the University, 1795-1914 Dyer, Serena During routine renovations, a ‘wallpaper sandwich’ - made up of twelve preserved layers of wallpaper - was removed from the wall of a student dorm room at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Carefully separated and conserved, these wallpapers provide a glimpse into the decorative domestic surroundings inhabited by students over 180 years, from the late eighteenth century onwards. Able to mimic or defy the aesthetic conventions of their parents’ homes, students were given relative freedom to decorate their college rooms as they wished. As such, these rooms represent a domestic haven within the institutional confines of the Cambridge college. This was a space in which students could explore and express their own ideas of domestic comfort and, for many students, create their first home. Using a selection of the wallpaper fragments as a framework, this article explores the decorative choices made by the young men who were students at Peterhouse in the nineteenth century, and contextualises them within a broader narrative of masculine material culture and domestic consumption. This article draws from the ‘wallpaper sandwich’, college photographic archives, and records of student experience. It argues that the domestic autonomy granted to the students who inhabited these rooms allowed them to craft a domestic interior within the college on their own terms. The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the URI link. Dyer, S. (2018) Masculinities, Wallpaper, and Crafting Domestic Space within the University, 1795-1914. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 14(2).

Research interests/expertise

Material Culture, Dress History, Consumption, Shopping, Retail, Nationhood and Britishness, Women's History

Areas of teaching

Fashion History, Material Culture, Women's History, History of Consumption

Qualifications

PhD: History, University of Warwick, 2012-2016
MA: Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, 2011-2012
BA (Hons): History and History of Art, University of York, 2008-2011

Courses taught

Design Cultures, MA History

Membership of external committees

Textile History, 2018-Present, Exhibition Reviews Editor.
William Morris Society, 2017-2018, Trustee.
British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2016-2017, Fine Art Reviews Editor, Criticks.
Association of Art Historians Postgraduate and Early Career Committee, 2013-2015, Treasurer.

Membership of professional associations and societies

FRHistS

AFHEA

FRSA

Projects

Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the Eighteenth Century

Structured around the material archives left by four genteel women, my first monograph (under contract with Bloomsbury), Material Lives, reveals the strategies employed by consumers to manage and express their lives through material culture. The volume focuses on four material biographies: Barbara Johnson’s album of fabric samples, Ann Frankland Lewis’s ‘dress of the year’ watercolours, Laetitia Powell’s doll-sized versions of her own garments, and Sabine Winn’s adorned prints. Approached as forms of life-writing, the material narratives constructed by these women reveal the gendered material strategies used to negotiate and record their interactions with the increasingly sophisticated world of goods. These women engaged with the material culture of making as a means of recording and navigating their lives, articulating their own biographical narratives through material ego-documents.

Labour of the Stitch: Making and Remaking Women’s Fashionable Dress in Georgian England

The making of fashionable women’s dress in Georgian England necessitated an inordinate amount of manual labour. From the mantua-makers and seamstresses who wrought lengths of silk and linen into garments, to the artists and engravers who disseminated and immortalised the resulting outfits in print and on paper, Georgian garments were the products of many busy hands. The Labour of the Stitch centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the industries which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. In doing so, this volume considers the symbiotic linkages between paper and textiles in the generation of cultures of fashionable dress, as elucidated by the manual labour of the hand.

Central to retrieving histories of manual labour are recreation methodologies. The embodied turn often positions finished garments on the body. Scholars in this field have focussed on the shaping of the torso or the holistic wearing of dress. The Labour of the Stitch brings together contemporary discussions of manual labour with recreation methodologies to explore how hands enacted the creation of dress. This process of recreation illuminates the depth of material literacy and skill required of garment makers, as well as the efficiency, competence, and productivity of the sewing hand.

Crucially, this volume interrogates the ways in which we think about dress within eighteenth-century studies and suggests that the practice-based approaches found in recreation methodologies can enrich the already interdisciplinary nature of the field. The labour of stitching, along with the labour of writing, printmaking, drawing, and painting, composed a holistic culture of making and manual labour which constructed eighteenth-century cultures of dress.

Conference attendance

2022

‘The Making, Meaning and Materiality of the Dressed Print in Europe, 1750-1820’, invited paper given at Gestes d'images online seminar series at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, France (20th January 2022).

2021

‘Sartorial Chronology and Fashionable Anachronism: Historicism, Temporality and the Making of Dress Histories’, paper given at the Sartorial Society Series (29th July 2021).

‘Making and Women’s Material Life Writing’, invited talk given at the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia (14th July 2021).

‘“Well regulate your Cash; to Trade attend”: The consumer as the arbiter of the moral economy’, invited paper given at Economic Justice in Early Modern Europe (1450-1850): Commemorating Fifty Years of E. P. Thompson’s ‘Moral Economy’, University of Warwick (20th May 2021).

‘Dress of the Year: Ann Frankland Lewis’s Sartorial Timekeeping’, invited paper given at From Fibre to Frock, Southern Counties Costume Society AGM (27th February 2021).

‘“Be-Nelsoned all over”: Patriotic Fashion, Anchor Accessories, and the Commemoration of the Battle of the Nile’, paper given at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference (6th January 2021).

2020

‘Fashions in Miniature: Laetitia Powell’s Dolls and Material Life-Writing’, invited paper given at Digital Materialities online seminar series at the University of Paris (14th December 2020).

‘Mr Calico and Mr Fribble: Queering the Man-Milliner, 1770-1820’, paper given at New Directions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art online seminar (19th October 2020).

Keynote Speaker at Fast x Slow Fashion: Experiences of Fashionable Consumption, 1720-2020, Leeds City Museum and the University of Leeds (13th March 2020).

Current research students

Jordan Mitchell-King, Undress: Informal Women’s Clothing in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 2021-Present, first supervisor with Dr Kate Smith, University of Birmingham (M4C/AHRC full scholarship).

Diya Wang, Hybridity and Transformation in Dress and Fashion between China and the West, 1840-1930, 2021-Present, second supervisor with Dr Emily Baines.

Externally funded research grants information

- Future Research Leader, DMU, £1,500.

- Pasold Research Fund, Major Project Grant, awarded for the Sartorial Society Series online research seminars, Co-I with Dr Bethan Bide, Dr Elisabeth Gernerd, Dr Liz Tregenza and Dr Lucie Whitmore, £1,648.

- Pasold Research Fund, Publication Award, £900.

- Patterns of British Manufacture: Nationhood and Textiles in Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 1809-1829, Pasold Research Fund Research Activity Grant, 2018-2019, £500, PI.

- Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Postdoctoral Fellowship, Paul Mellon Centre, £8000, 2018-2019, PI.

- Trained to Consume: Dress and the Female Consumer, 1720-1820, British Federation of Women Graduates, Marjorie Shaw Scholarship, £2,000, 2015-2016 PI.

- Trained to Consume: Dress and the Female Consumer, 1720-1820, ESRC, PhD Scholarship, £55,000, 2012-2015, PI.