Professor Sarah Knott
I am a feminist, writer, and historian of women, reproduction and social reproduction. My books and co-edited collections include Sensibility and the American Revolution; Women, Gender and Enlightenment (with Barbara Taylor); Mother Is A Verb: An Unconventional History; and Mothering’s Many Labours (with Emma Griffin). I have served on the editorial board of Past and Present since 2013.
I write for public as well as scholarly audiences, and my work has appeared in translation in many languages. I also like to work closely with archivists and curators, who are key collaborators with historians in the preservation and interpretation of the pasts of those most usually hidden in the historical record.
I joined Oxford’s Faculty of History and St John’s College as the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History in 2024. In the previous two decades, I worked in the United States, most recently as the Sally M Reahard Professor of History at Indiana University. Whilst in the States, I was editor of the American Historical Review, and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. I was educated at a state grammar school in Colchester, and then did studies at Oxford (MA and DPhil), University of Pennsylvania (MA, Thouron Fellowship), and University of London (Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral fellowship, Feminism and Enlightenment project).
I am a Senior Research Fellow of the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender and Reproduction, where my work focuses on archives and histories of birth, reproduction and care.
At Oxford, I teach in women’s, gender and queer history; reproduction; and care and social reproduction.
Research Interests
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Age of revolutions
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Women, reproduction, maternities
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Feminist practice, method and form
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Care and social reproduction
My earliest cluster of research concerns the eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions – on the making of “sentimental” new societies, for example, and on white republican motherhood, rights feminism and female citizenship. This extends to how subsequent commentators have interpreted revolution based on changing notions of narrative.
A longue durée cluster of research explores reproduction and social reproduction, especially birth, maternal labour, and the dynamics of care broadly understood. This research suggests that “care” is a foundational category of historical analysis, and looks to intersectional feminist scholarship in a range of contemporary disciplines.
All my research and writing is marked by a curiosity about feminist practice, from method and form, to voice, citation, and collaboration. Mother Is A Verb blended memoir and history, for example, and used fragment and anecdote. The Archival Fragments, Experimental Modes Collective, meanwhile, is inspired by women’s history and Black Studies to embrace formal experimentation.
