The Team

The AHRC Network is run by the Principal and Co-Investigator.

Dr Serena Dyer

Principal Investigator

Dr Serena Dyer is a historian, broadcaster, and curator, specializing in the history of fashion, shopping, and material culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is Associate Professor of Fashion History at De Montfort Univesity.

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). She is the presenter of English Heritage's Fashion Through History series and regularly appears on BBC radio. Her next book,  Labour of the Stitch , is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Dr Sarah Bendall

Co-Investigator

Sarah A. Bendall is a material culture and gender historian specialising in the production, trade and consumption of global commodities and fashionable consumer goods between 1500-1800. She is a research fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU.


She is author of Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England,  which was published by Bloomsbury in 2021 and shortlisted for the Society for Renaissance Studies book prize in 2022. She is currently working on her second book, The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens, which is also under contract with Bloomsbury, as well as a project on whaling and fashion. 

The Advisory Board

The Investigators are supported by an advisory board of experts in the field.