Serena Dyer

Dr Serena Dyer FRHistS AFHEA is a historian, broadcaster, and curator, specializing in the history of fashion, shopping, and material culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her prize-winning first book, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. She also edited Shopping and the Senses (Palgrave, 2022), Disseminating Dress (Bloomsbury, 2022), and Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Bloomsbury, 2020). Her current research projects include work on the performance of British patriotism through dress, the history of buying British, historicism and sartorial temporality, and recreation and remaking dress as a historical methodology.

Serena is Associate Professor of Fashion History and Material Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick in 2016 and has previously taught at the University of Hertfordshire and the University of York. Before returning to academia, Serena was Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture and Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery. She is the presenter of English Heritage/Our Media's Fashion Through History, and she regularly appears on BBC radio. She currently leads the AHRC-funded Making Historical Dress: Hands, Bodies and Methods Network (Co-I, Dr Sarah Bendall ACU).