Sara is a specialist in early modern culture, literature, and medicine, with a specific focus on women’s reproductive health. As such, her interests fall within the multi-disciplinary field of health humanities. She is a widely published literary historian, media commentator, and as a creative writer, the author of two historical novels.
Sara is always interested in discussing potential PhD projects in early modern women's health and culture, and in receiving proposals from creative writing practitioners.
Academic Career
- Appointed as Senior Lecturer, Loughborough University, 2021
- Co- authored, with Dr Catie Gill, an impact case study for REF 2021
- PGCAP (Distinction), Loughborough University, 2016
- Visiting Lecturer, Newman University, 2014 - 2015
- Sessional Lecturer, Birmingham City University, 2014
- Appointed as a Lecturer at Loughborough University, 2013
- Visiting Lecturer, University of Worcester, 2011 - 2012
- PhD in English, Loughborough University, 2010
- MA (Distinction), Early Modern Writing, Loughborough University, 2006
- BA (First Class Honours), English, Loughborough University, 2005
- City & Guilds 7302 Certificate in Delivering Learning, 2005
Professional Responsibilities, and Fellowships
- Fellow of the Royal Historical Society from 2019
- Fellow of the Higher Education Academy from 2016
- Post-doctoral Fellow of the Society for Renaissance Studies, 2012-13
- Academic advisor to the National Civil War Centre in Newark, since 2017 with Dr Catie Gill. Their work helps the museum diversify their exhibitions and develop new ways of telling women’s stories using their collections. You can watch some of the work they have been doing in a presentation about seventeenth-century birth practices and in a video about how fake news cancelled Christmas.
- Member of the organising committee of the Women’s Studies Group, 1558-1837, since 2013
- AHRC funding for two years doctoral research 2007-09
Media Work
- Regular pieces in historical periodicals in the UK and overseas. She has pieces in History Today, Discover Your Ancestors, and Who Do You Think You Are?, Family History, BBC History and Outlook India.
- Appearances on radio and television include BBC's Countryfile (Dec 2021) and the BBC History Extra podcast discussing childbirth in history. She is interviewed regularly on various BBC radio outlets such as Woman’s Hour (August 2024) and Free Thinking (August 2023; December 2017) about her research and is happy to receive media enquiries.
Sara’s research focus is on the cultural representation of women’s physical and spiritual health in early modern England, and in creative writing with a specialism in historical fiction. She is currently writing her third novel with the working title Bold Beauty. This is a bio-fictional novel about a notorious Restoration female figure.
- Her doctoral research was developed into a monograph, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England published by Palgrave Macmillan (2013). This was followed by a co-edited an anthology of women’s writings about their bodily and spiritual health, Flesh and Spirit: An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Women’s Writing for Manchester University Press (2014). This volume included some women whose writing is anthologised and so made available to a wider audience for the first time. This includes women writing during the English Civil Wars. Her research has gone on to analyse the presentation of miscarriage and pregnancy in this era and she has published widely on this topic.
- Sara has published two practice-as-research historical novels historical novels, The Gossips’ Choice (2020) which follows the life of a midwife working in 1665, her family saga, and the lives of the women she serves. It is set against the backdrop of the Great Plague of 1665 and is based on the writings of real historical figures who have informed Sara’s research over the years. A sequel, The Midwife's Truth was, set against the backdrop of the Great Fire, was published in spring 2023. Her short story ‘Letters from London’, appeared in an anthology If These Walls Could Talk with proceeds in aid of Tamworth Castle.
- She recently co-edited a special edition of Women's Writing called Women's Writing about Illness and Disease (29.4) with Dr Jennifer Evans (Herts) on women and illness, and is editing a volume of A Cultural History of Blood which is to come out as part of the Bloomsbury cultural history series. Sara is editing the 'early modern' volume 1400-1700.
- With her English colleague Dr Andrew Dix, she co-authored “Animation, Adaptation, and the Plague”. Adaptation. 16 (3) 2023: 406-26.
- She has been appointed the external or internal examiner on 8 higher degrees, including at the Universities of Aberystwyth, Nottingham, Southampton, Sussex, and York. She is happy to be approached to examine both critical and creative theses in any area of her historical research or creative practices.
Sara takes an interdisciplinary approach to all subjects blending historical and cultural studies with literary criticism. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds a PGCAP qualification in teaching and delivering learning at HE level.
- Sara has taught broadly across the English module suite from first year survey modules to those on higher degree taught programmes. She leads the module Love and Love in Stuart Era Writing (1603-1714), and The People’s History: Writing about the English Civil Wars, Past and Present. With Dr Claire O’Callaghan she co-leads the new Health Humanities module Maladies and Medicine for which she oversaw its recent validation.
- Sara believes that all writing is a creative endeavour. Through studying creative writing techniques her students benefit from not only learning to research and write stories, but also how to write engagingly for any medium. This is a key aspect of employability in whatever career our students choose to pursue. Sara’s students also benefit from her experience in the publishing industry across all platforms from the popular press and magazine pieces, to novels and creative non-fiction trade books, to academic journal articles and monographs.
- She leads the MA module Writing for Publication, and always includes an opportunity to include a well-researched creative piece as an assessment option across her modules wherever practical.
Sara has supervised a range of literary historical and creative writing doctoral projects to completion
Current PhD supervision
- Megan Constable, “Writing as Other: Investigating the ‘Right to Write’ in Fictional Representations of Disability with a Creative Response.” Extension year.
Completed doctoral researchers
- Chloe Owen, completed, May 2021. “‘My dream was lengthened after life’: Sleep, Hallucinations, and the Supernatural in Early Modern Drama.”
- Katie Woodhouse-Skinner, completed, December 2021, “Recovering Female Adolescence in Adolescent Life Writing and Socio-Medical Discourse in England between 1660 and 1785.”
- Amelia Mills, completed March 2023, “Aphra Behn’s Fiction, Verse and the Art of Translation: What ‘the ‘Translatress’ created using her French sources.”
- Sarah Rai Powell, completed, January 2025, ‘Autism and Menstruation in young adult literature.
Sara has been appointed the external or internal examiner on 8 higher degrees, including at the Universities of Aberystwyth, Nottingham, Southampton, Sussex, and York. She is happy to be approached to examine both critical and creative theses in any area of her historical research or creative practices.
- Read, S (2024) The materials of midwifery in early modern England in five groups of objects. In Dopfel, CG (ed) Maternal Materialities: Objects, Rituals and Material Evidence of Medieval and Early Modern Childbirth, Brepols Publishers, pp.187-200, ISBN: 9782503605739.
- Read, S (2023) The Midwife's Truth, Wild Pressed Books, ISBN: 978-1916377455.
- Read, S (2020), The Gossips’ Choice (Wild Pressed Books)
- Read, S (2020) “Not knowing the disease you”ll miss the cure”. Considering prose fiction published in Aphra Behn’s name in a medical context, Women's Writing, 27(3), 361-376, ISSN: 0969-9082.
- Read, S (2017) Pregnant women gaze at the precious things their souls are set on: Perceptions of the pregnant body in early modern literature. In Perceptions of Pregnancy, ed by Jennifer Evans and Ciara Meehan (Palgrave Macmillan), pp.133-159, ISBN: 9783319441672. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44168-9.
- Adcock, Rachel, Sara Read and Anna Ziomek, eds (2014) Flesh and Spirit: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing (Manchester University Press, 2014)
- Read, S (2013) Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England(Palgrave, 2013)