Keith David Malcolm Snell, FRAI, is an Anglo-Welsh academic historian who holds a personal chair as Professor of Rural and Cultural History at the University of Leicester.
His Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), supervised by Professor Sir Tony Wrigley at The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, was awarded in 1979.
[1] Snell was then appointed Research Fellow in the Humanities at King's College, Cambridge, 1979–1983, before taking up a lectureship in the Department of Economics and Related Studies at the University of York.
His work stresses the relevance of history for present concerns: the quality of life, the family economy, unemployment, regional cultures, 'community' and localism, 'belonging', and modern loneliness.
He is especially associated with arguments for wider historical meanings and criteria affecting the quality of life; for the historical and geographical diversity of regional cultures in Britain and Ireland, notably focusing upon religion and regional fiction; for the enduring administrative and cultural features of localism and the parish well into British industrialization; and concerning the changing nature of ‘community’, migration, belonging, personal isolation and lone-living over the past three centuries.