Role
Steven King is a modern British historian with primary research interests in the period from 1750 to the present. He is best known as an historian of welfare, writing on topics such as regional welfare regimes, the agency of poor people and welfare claimants, advocacy for the poor, and the particular experiences of the sick and disabled under the British welfare system from 1601. Most recently he has published a considerable longitudinal study of welfare fraud from 1601 to the present. His book Fraudulent Lives: Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present (McGill-Queens University Press, 2024) provides the first long-term estimates of the scale of actual and suspected fraud and argues that policymakers, politicians, advocates, the general public and others have never been interested in eliminating such fraudulent activity. With Dr Paul Carter (The National Archives) he holds a five-year British Academy Projects Grant to support the research and teaching resource: ‘Voices of the Victorian Poor’:
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/voices-of-the-victorian-poor/
Steven has supervised 47 PhD candidates to completion, examined 30 more at different institutions, and currently supervises 13 candidates including those holding studentships from the AHRC and ESRC. He has a deep commitment to collaborative publishing (writing with more than thirty different co-authors) and support for early career colleagues. His grants have supported the careers of 22 different research assistants.
King has been deeply involved in research and REF management throughout his career, founding four major research centres and leading three RAE/REF exercises at different institutions. He is currently Co-Director of the Centre for History, Heritage and Memory Studies, and a member of both the ESRC and AHRC Peer Review Panels. His teaching is concentrated at MA/MSc levels and encompasses both thematic modules (History and Policy) and methods courses (Fundamentals in Quantitative Research, for the ESRC programme). In addition, he leads the undergraduate course ‘Money matters’, an innovative teaching programme in which students develop a fantasy investment portfolio using their particular history skills and knowledge.
Career overview
Steven King joined Nottingham Trent University in 2020. He has previously held posts at the University of Leicester, Oxford Brookes University, the University of Central Lancashire and the Institute of Historical Research. Prior to his academic career, Steven worked for the National Westminster Bank. At Oxford Brookes he held the roles of Associate Dean (Research) and Associate Dean (Resources). For the University of Leicester, he fulfilled a number of roles around research, widening participation, and leading research centres before becoming PVC and Head of the College of Social Sciences. He has been editor of the journal Family and Community History for the last twenty years, and held visiting positions in Germany, France, and Norway.
Research areas
Steven King currently holds simultaneously grants from the Leverhulme Trust, British Academy, ESRC, and AHRC. These shape his research focus from 2025 to 2029:
- Leverhulme Trust Project Grant (April 2025-March 2028) which looks at the stories, motivations, and experiences of benefit fraudsters in England, Wales, and Scotland between the 1750s and the present. The central hypothesis of the grant is that politicians construct fraud as a modern problem requiring modern solutions, whereas in fact the motivations, experiences and attitudes of fraudsters has a deep historical continuity.
- British Academy Project Grant (May 2025-April 2030; with Dr Paul Carter of The National Archives). This grant funds a large volunteer group that will work on discovering and transcribing pauper and advocate letters in TNA’s collection MH12. A researcher will code material and feed it into the existing research and teaching resource ‘Voices of the Victorian Poor’. By 2030 we will have investigated all 16,000+ volumes of correspondence in MH12 and created an unrivalled geo-located and thematically coded resource for investigating the words of the poor between 1834 and 1929.
- ESRC Project Grant (May 2023-August 2026; with Professor Owen Davies, University of Hertfordshire). This grant investigates the persistence of informal healing cultures alongside the rise of formalised medicine from 1834 to 1948. Focusing on a broad spectrum of services and provides – from bonesetters and worm doctors to hedge doctors and witches – we produce the first comprehensive survey of such provision in the century before the NHS.
- AHRC Project Grant (September 2025-March 2029; with Dr Paul Carter of TNA and Dr Steve Thompson at the University of Aberystwyth). This grant will investigate the spread of and resistance to the New Poor Law in Wales. Combining local and central records for the first time and exploring material both in Welsh and English, we will ask: What was particularly ‘Welsh’ about a New Poor Law that was supposed to apply equally to England and Wales?
Collectively these grants feed into King’s wider research programme which has three core aims: (i) To reconstruct the experiences of being poor across the period from 1601; (ii) To understand how power was held, deployed, and contested in different incarnations of the welfare state; (iii) To argue that the history of welfare matters both for understanding the welfare dilemmas of the present and for shaping the character and entitlements of welfare citizenship in the future.
King’s prior work in these areas has been extensively recognised in prize competitions. His co-authored book In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law (McGill-Queens University Press, 2022) won the 2022 North American Victorian Studies Association Best Book of 2022 Prize and the 2023 American Historical Association Morris D. Forkosch Prize 2023. His jointly authored book Navigating the Old English Poor Law: The Kirkby Lonsdale Letters, 1809-1836 (Oxford University Press, 2020) won The American Library Association Reference and User Services Association (RUSA): Best Historical Materials Award. King’ sole authored Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s (McGill-Queens University Press, 2019) won the 2019 British Academy's Peter Townsend Prize and the 2020 British Records Association Janette Harley Prize.
External activity
Steven is Executive Editor of Family and Community History and has filled this role since 2005. He is also a board member of the N.W. Posthumus Institute and a member of the Peer Review Colleges of the ESRC and AHRC. In 2020 he was elected as Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Sponsors and collaborators
Steven has held more than £9,000,000 worth of grants across the spectrum from the Leverhulme Trust, Wellcome Trust, British Academy, AHRC, ESRC, EU, British Council and Pasold Trust. Current or recent collaborators include:
Open Theatre Company
Uppingham Town Council
The National Trust
The National Archives
Publications
Publications since 2018:
S. A. King, Fraudulent Lives: Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present (Montreal, 2024).
E. Hurren and S. A. King, ‘Circulation, circularity and the “place” of institutions in nineteenth-century England and Wales’, in C. Beardmore (ed.), Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Institution (Newcastle, 2024), 177-202.
S. A. King and M. Yates, ‘Life-Cycle and the Navigation of the New Poor Law Workhouse: The Case of Casuals and Vagrants’, in C. Beardmore (ed.), Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Institution (Newcastle, 2024), 20-44.
S. A. King, ‘Fractured Courtships in Britain in the Long Nineteenth-Century’, Family and community History, 26 (2023), 27-48.
S. A. King, ‘“No More for Now or Praps Never”: The Meaning and Function of Pauper Writing in Britain, 1750s to early 1900s’, in M. Lyons (ed.), The Common Writer in Modern History (Manchester, 2023), 45-59.
S. A. King, ‘Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780-1834’, in S. Goldsmith, S. Haggerty and K. Harvey (eds.), Letters and the Body, 1700-1830: Writing and Embodiment (London, 2023), 191-211.
S. A. King, P. Carter, P. Jones, N. Carter and C. Beardmore, In Their Own Write: A New Poor Law History From Below (Montreal, 2022).
S. A. King, ‘Space, welfare and agency in England and Wales, 1780s-1840s’, in A. Gestrich, E. Grüener and S. Hahn (eds.), Poverty in Modern Europe: Spaces, Localities, Institutions (Oxford, 2022), 31-55.
S.A. King, ‘The British welfare citizen: Past, present, future’, in G. Gregorini, M. Taccolini and R. Semeraro (eds.), I Volti della Povertá. Temi, parole,fonti per la stria dei sistemi di support sociale tra modernitá e globalizzazione (Milan, 2022), 37-41.
S. A. King, ‘Introduction: Death, Memory and commemoration in the English Midlands, 1600-1900’, Midland History, 47 (2022), 223-31.
S.A. King, ‘Remembering the dead poor in the Midlands, 1750s to 1880s’, Midland History, 47 (2022), 292-312.
S. A. King, ‘“still about the town”: Constructing disability in small town nineteenth century England’, Family and Community History, 25 (2022), 98-120.
P. Carter and S. A. King, ‘The Patients View as History From Below: Evidence from the Victorian Poor, 1834–1871’, in A. Hanley and J. Meyer (eds.), Patient Voices in Britain, 1840–1948: Historical and Policy Perspectives (Manchester, 2021), 154-82.
P. Jones, S. A. King and K. Thompson, ‘Clothing the New Poor Law workhouse in the nineteenth century’, Rural History, 32 (2021), 127-48.
S. A. King, ‘Women, Migration and Textile Work in West Yorkshire, 1800–1851’, Family and Community History, 24 (2021), 4-23.
C. Anderson, J. Kebbell and S. A. King, ‘Introduction: Celebrating the Centenary of the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Howard Journal’, The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 60 (2021), 6-18.
N. Carter and S. A. King, ‘“I think we ought not to acknowledge them [paupers] as that encourages them to write”: The administrative state, power and the Victorian pauper’, Social History, 46 (2021), 117-44.
P. Jones and S. A. King, Navigating the Old English Poor Law: The Kirkby Lonsdale Letters, 1809-1836 (Oxford, 2020)
P. Jones and S. A. King, Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England – Bearing Witness (Basingstoke, 2020)
P. Jones and S. A. King, ‘Fragments of Fury? Lunacy, Agency and Contestation in the Great Yarmouth Workhouse, 1890s-1900s’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 51 (2020), 235-65.
S. A. King and C. Beardmore, ‘Contesting the workhouse: Life writing, children and the later New Poor Law’, in L. O’Hagan (ed.), Rebellious Writing: Contesting Marginalisation in Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2020), 65-94.
R. Abdullah, R. Weston, H. Mansoor, P. Jackson and S. King, ‘Manufacturing transformational change through asset orchestration’, in M. Zakaria, A. Abdul Majeed and M. Hassan (eds.), Advances in Mechatronics, Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering (Singapore, 2020), 154-60.
S. A. King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s (London, 2019); Winner of the 2019 British Academy Peter Townsend Prize
C. Beardmore, C. Dobbing and S. A. King (eds.) Family Life in Britain, 1650-1910 (Basingstoke, 2019).
S. King, ‘Configuring and Re-Configuring Families in Nineteenth-Century England’, in C. Beardmore, C. Dobbing and S. A. King (eds.) Family Life in Britain, 1650-1910 (Basingstoke, 2019), 229-253.
P. Carter, J. James and S. A. King, ‘Punishing Paupers? Control, Discipline and Mental Health in the Southwell Workhouse, 1836-1871’, Rural History, 30 (2019), 161-80.
S. A. King, Sickness, Medical Welfare and the English Poor 1750-1834 (Manchester, 2018)
H. Mansoor, R. Weston, R. Abdullah, S. King, P. Jackson and P. Foley, ‘A systemic approach to applying asset orchestration theory’, International Journal of Agile Systems and Management, 11 (2018), 315-39.
C. Muldrew and S. A. King, ‘Cash, wages and the economy of makeshifts, 1650-1800’, in J. Hatcher and J. Stephenson (eds.), Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages (Basingstoke, 2018), 267-306.
Press expertise
The Past, Present and Future of the Welfare State
Courtship and marriage
Vaccines and pandemics
Care homes/adult social care
Histories of disability
Histories of medicine
Ageing and old age
Pensions
Benefit Cheats
I currently run a research project called 'The Age of Less' which argues that development, sustainability and climate gaols can only be achieved by learning from the lessons of history that 'less' of everything is essential.