Sarah Knott is the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History and a Professorial Fellow of St John’s College. Before returning to Oxford, she spent two decades in the United States, most recently as the Sally M. Reahard Professor of History at Indiana University.
She has published widely in North America and the Age of Revolutions, and on the long and intersectional history of women and gender. Her research and writing focus especially on subjectivity, experience, reproduction and social reproduction, on both a large and small scale. Another strand of her scholarship investigates feminist approaches to concepts, method, voice and genre. The widely reviewed and translated Mother: An Unconventional History investigated pregnancy, birth and the encounter with a child and explored history and memoir. Her essays and commentary have appeared in the William & Mary Quarterly, the American Historical Review and Past & Present, as well as in the Guardian, TLS, LARB, and BBC History Magazine.
Knott is a Senior Research Fellow at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and a member of the black feminist inspired Archival Fragments, Experimental Modes Collective. She is currently at work on the long history of care - as "sweaty" feminist concept, and as intersectional historical experience.
Select publications
- Care and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming)
- Mothering's Many Labours (ed. with Emma Griffin, Past & Present, 2020)
- Mother Is A Verb: An Unconventional History (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2019)
- Sensibility and the American Revolution (Omohundro Institute, University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
- Women, Gender and Enlightenment (ed. with Barbara Taylor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
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