Dr David Kennerley

Profile

I completed my doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2014. I held part-time lectureships at Worcester and Somerville Colleges at Oxford, alongside working as a research assistant to Professor Kathryn Gleadle, before becoming a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded 'Music in London, 1800-1851' project at King's College London in 2016. 

I joined Queen Mary as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of History in October 2017. My research project for this fellowship is entitled: 'A sonic history of Chartism: Music, sound and politics in Britain, c.1838-1848'.

Teaching

HST4602 - History in Practice
HST5365 - Chartists, Rebels and Suffragettes: Democracy in Britain, 1830-1928

Research

Research Interests:

I specialise in the history of sound, musical life and performance in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My aim is to uncover what the aural dimension of the past can tell us about broader patterns of social, cultural and political change. Specifically, my recent and current work focuses on:

- Sonic aspects of gender, especially women’s voices in British musical life
- Women musicians and professional identities
- Music and political culture, especially the loyalist songs of Charles Dibdin
- The sonic history of Chartism

Publications

Books

Sounding Feminine. Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780-1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Articles in peer-reviewed journals

‘Debating female musical professionalism and artistry in the British press, c.1820–1850’, Historical Journal 58:4 (2015), 987–1008

Chapters in books

'Professionalization and the female musician in early Victorian Britain: the campaign for Eliza Salmon' in Rosemary Golding (ed.), The Music Profession in Britain 1780-1920: New Perspectives on Status and Identity (London: Routledge, 2018)

‘Loyalism, Celebrity and the Politics of Personality: Dibdin in the 1790s’ in Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley and Ian Newman (eds.), Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2018)

‘Hofer, The Tell of the Tyrol: Patriotism and the Chartists in Early Victorian Britain’ in Michael Burden, Wendy Heller, Jonathan Hicks and Ellen Lockhart (eds), Staging History, 1780–1840 (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2016), 80–99

Edited collections

With Oskar Cox Jensen and Ian Newman (eds.), Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2018)