About

I am a Senior Lecturer in History, with a particular interest in British History in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am also the programme leader for undergraduate History provision.

Teaching responsibilities

I teach modules on material culture, British country houses, gender history, historical methodologies, and public history. I also supervise undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations on a wide range of historical topics.

Research interests

My main area of research is in the history of British country houses and their families. I am especially interested in gender relations, letter writing practices, and the role of the country house in local, national and international networks. 

I am also interested in inclusive practice in learning and teaching in Higher Education, especially in relation to assessment and curriculum design.

Membership of professional bodies

Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Member of the Royal Historical Society.

Qualifications

• BA (Hons) Archaeology, University of York
• MA Medieval Studies, University of York
• PhD on Elite Women in the Yorkshire Country House, 1685-1858, University of York

Recent conferences

(with Professor Ian Whitehead) 'Employing Digital Tools to Support Continual Assessment', at Assessment in History: Reassessing the purpose and future of assessment in the study of History, Online Conference, History UK, October 2022

'Let’s talk about Sex' at Innovations in Teaching Eighteenth-Century History, Online Workshop hosted by University of Northampton, June 2020

‘Gendered spaces? Dynasty and domesticity in the English country house, 1750-1850’ Studies of Home IHR Seminar, University of London, June 2019

Re-empowering the country house family? Domestic life in the country house guidebook 1945-2010, at Powering the Powerhouse, University of Sheffield and Chatsworth, June 2018

“Upon my Lady Carlisle’s walking”: agency and the aristocratic woman's negotiation of space. Keynote Lecture at Women’s Negotiations of Space, 1500-1900 conference, University of Hull, January 2018

Recent publications

R.M. Larsen, ‘Gender and the Home’ in C. Edwards (ed.) A Cultural History of Home: Enlightenment. London: Bloomsbury, 2021

R.M. Larsen, ‘An Archaeology of Letter Writing: the correspondence of aristocratic women in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England’, C. Archer-Parré and M. Dick (eds) Pen and Print: communication in the Enlightenment. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020.

R.M. Larsen, Sisterly guidance: elite women, sorority and the life cycle, 1770–1860, in T. Dooley, M. O'Riordan and C. Ridgway (eds) Women and the country house in Ireland and Britain. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018.

R.M. Larsen and Ian Whitehead (eds) Popular Experience and Cultural Representation of the Great War 1914-1918. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2017.