Dr Lucy Faire, SFHEA
BA (York)
MA (Leicester)
PhD (Leicester)
Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Responsibilities
- Chair of the Board of Directors
- History tutor
- Vaughan Open Research Forum
Biography
I am a founder member of Leicester Vaughan College and have been teaching mature students at university level since 2002. I taught at the former Vaughan College and in the Vaughan Centre of Lifelong Learning on the HE Certificates in Modern Social History and Modern British History, and on the HE Certificate and BA in Humanities and Arts. I have been an Associate Lecturer for the Open University since 2009, teaching on its MA in History. I am a visiting honorary fellow in the Centre for Urban History.
Prior to teaching at the Vaughan Centre, I was a Research Associate at Nottingham University in the Institute of Film Studies; a Research Associate in the Department of Geography at Loughborough University; and I taught full-time undergraduates and MA students in various History departments at Leicester University.
Teaching Areas
I teach modern social history post 1700, particularly the history of everyday life, leisure and behaviour (mainly bad behaviour!), urban history and the history of material culture.
Research Areas
My main research area is the history of the everyday life. The central approach of my work is to understand how people interact with their environment and with each other and, importantly, to analyse their subjective experiences.
My PhD examined working-class perceptions of family life and the home in the period 1990-1955, which I completed in the former Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Leicester. This doctoral research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and examined the impact of class, generation, religion and gender on the uses of domestic space, time spent in the home, household goods and family relationships.
I have researched the experience of leisure, in particular cinema-going and seaside holidays, and am currently investigating peoples’ behaviour in city centres in the middle decades of the twentieth century with Dr Denise McHugh (Open University).
Publications
- Lucy Faire and Denise McHugh, ‘Sensory and Emotional Histories of the High Street’, Context, 171 (2022), 24-27.
- Lucy Faire and Miriam Gill, ‘Phoenix from the Ashes: The Origins and Development of Leicester Vaughan College’, in Cilla Ross and Malcolm Noble, eds, Reclaiming the University for the Public Good: Experiments and Futures in Co-operative Higher Education (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
- Lucy Faire and Denise McHugh, ‘Twelve Shades of Grey: Encountering Urban Colour in the Street in British Provincial Towns, c. 1945-1970’, Urban History, 46:2 (2019), 288-308.
- Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire, eds, Research Methods for History, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2016).
- Lucy Faire, ‘The Transformation of Home?’ in Richard Rodger and Rebecca Madgin eds, Leicester: A Modern History (Lancaster: Carnegie, 2016).
- Lucy Faire and Denise McHugh, ‘The Everyday Usage of City-Centre Streets: Urban Behaviour in Provincial Britain c. 1930-1970’, Urban History Review, 42:2 (2014), 18-28.
- ‘Dressing for the Beach’, Unit 4.3 for the Open University Arts Foundation Course, AA100 (Milton Keynes: Open University, 2008).
- Morag Bell, Tim Brown and Lucy Faire, ‘Germs, Genes and Postcolonial Geographies: Reading the Return of Tuberculosis to Leicester, UK’, Cultural Geographies, 13 (2006), 577-599.
- Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire with Sarah Stubbings, The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (London: British Film Institute, 2003).
- Phil Hubbard, Keith Lilley and Lucy Faire, ‘Memorials to Modernity? Public Art in the “City of the Future”‘, Landscape Research, 28:2 (2003), 147-169.
- Phil Hubbard, Lucy Faire and Keith Lilley, ‘Contesting the Modern City: Reconstruction and Everyday Life in Post-War Coventry’, Planning Perspectives, 18 (2003), 377-397.
- Phil Hubbard, Keith Lilley and Lucy Faire, ‘Remembering Post-War Reconstruction: Modernism and City Planning in Coventry, 1940-1962’, Planning History, 24:2 (2002), 7-20.
- Lucy Faire, ‘Wealth and Status in the Norfolk Hearth Tax,’ in , Aspects of English Small Towns in the 18th and 19th Centuries , ed. by Alasdair Milne and Ralph Weedon (Leicester: Centre for Urban History, 1993), pp. 5-25.
- Birgitte Darger, Lucy Faire and Luc Verpoest, ‘The Written City’, in Taking Sides: Antwerp’s 19th-century Belt: Elements for a Culture of the City , ed. by Pieter Uyttenhove (Antwerp: ANTWERPEN ’93, 1993), pp. 198-218.
Community
For five years (2015-2020) I was an external examiner for the University of York’s Centre for Lifelong Learning on their Higher Education Certificates in Arts and Humanities and Archaeology.