Dr David Kennerley

I am a historian of modern Britain with a particular interest in the social, cultural and political significance of sound and music in the past. My research career thus far has been structured around two major projects. The first focused on sonic aspects of gender, especially the contested meanings of the female voice, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second explored the entanglement of sound and music with emerging ideas of, and campaigns for, democracy in British political culture, primarily in the Chartist movement, but with attention to both earlier and later radical movements from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. I am now beginning a new project on birdsong in British culture from the eighteenth century to the present.

Research Interests

The thread that connects my diverse research interests is a preoccupation with sounds, and their social, cultural, and political meanings, in the past. My work addresses the methodological challenge of studying a phenomenon that had an undoubted impact upon past societies, but which, given its evanescent nature, is no longer available for the historian to study directly in the manner of printed, visual, or material sources. Drawing on insights from musicology, sound studies, and sensory history, I am especially interested in how people’s interactions with the soundscapes around them and their own sound- and music-making illuminate aspects of material, bodily and social experiences less readily accessible from more conventional sources and approaches.

My first book, Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) explored the conflicting meanings contemporaries ascribed to the sounds of women's voices in British culture, revealing the complex entanglement of female vocality with class, religious, national and gender identity. Bringing social and cultural history into greater dialogue with musicology, the book not only developed our understanding of the work of gender in shaping musical genres, performance practices, and the behaviour of the music profession, amateurs and audiences, but also shed new light on the conflicting forms of middle-class identity and culture emerging in this period in the wake of the evangelical revival. The book also sought to advance the practice of gender history more generally, especially in its attentiveness to the embodied and the sonic nature of gendered experience.

I have recently completed a second monograph, Shout for Freedom: A Sonic History of Chartism and the Origins of British Democracy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2026) which explored the role of sound and music in the Chartist movement, and British political culture more generally, as tensions over the possibility of working-class citizenship and democratic reform intensified from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It offers a fresh interpretation of this pivotal point in British political history, providing new explanations for Chartism’s immense appeal and its eventual defeat. In particular, it sheds fresh light on the aural experience of class amid the early industrial soundscape, uncovers the vibrancy and political potency of working-class culture and sociability, especially communal music-making, and reveals the conflicts taking place in this era between differing sonic modes of liberal and Chartist political communication and political subjectivity. Out of that conflict, the book suggests, emerged the political frameworks that have defined the nature, and the limits, of democracy in modern Britain.

I am now beginning a third major research project on birdsong in (mainly British) culture since the eighteenth century (though I am deeply interested in the historical depth of birdsong’s resonances across even longer expanses of time and in thinking about varying habitats and eco-systems rather than nation-states). Drawing on recent trends towards both greater integration of the history of the senses and of non-human animals within the environmental humanities, the aim is to explore how people’s changing interactions with birdsong and the varying meanings they invested in it reflect humanity’s developing relationship to nature in the wake of the scientific, agricultural, industrial and Romantic revolutions of the long eighteenth century.