Sarah Kenny

I joined the University of Birmingham in the Autumn of 2017 after completing my PhD at the University of Sheffield. I offer teaching and research supervision on numerous aspects of modern British history, with particular attention to histories of social change, community, and lived experience.

I am the Academic Integrity Officer for the School of History and Cultures and the Deputy Admissions Tutor for the Department of History.

I am primarily a historian of youth, and my research considers the multiple intersections between young people, popular culture, leisure, consumerism, politics and regulation, and the built environment. I explore these themes in my first monograph Growing Up and Going Out: Youth Culture, Commerce, and Leisure Space in Post-War Britain, which was published by Manchester University Press in 2024. Growing Up and Going Out demonstrates the extent to which young people reshaped the post-war built environment in Britain, and considers the ways in which youth leisure was provided, regulated, and experienced.

More recently my research has focused on youth consumption and youth organisations. My work on youth consumption includes a project on marketing to youth with using a case study of the Milk Marketing Board, and a study of young people’s consumption of alcoholic drinks. My next major research project focuses on youth organisations and uses the Young Man’s Christian Association (YMCA) to consider how formal organisations approached the varied and intersecting needs of young people in Britain from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

I have published on a wide range of topics related to youth, leisure, and popular culture in modern Britain, including teenage magazines and adolescent sexuality, popular culture in the 1980s, and nightclubs and urban redevelopment. I have collaborated with a number of organisations on this work, including the BBC and the YMCA.

More broadly I am active in the field of modern British history. I am the Director of the Centre for Modern British Studies at the University of Birmingham. Alongside Dr Sarah Crook (Swansea University), I am the co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Contemporary British History and am a contributor to a number of edited collections in this area including The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Thatcher (forthcoming) and A Cultural History of Leisure in the Modern Age (2021).