Professor Harris’s research focuses on families, women, and gender in eighteenth-century Britain. She has also written on family and genealogy in the Latter-day Saint context. She is an Accredited Genealogist and currently serves as the Family History Program Coordinator.
Her first book, Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England: Share and Share Alike (Manchester, 2012) used both historical and genealogical methods to explore sibling relationships and their connections to political and social ideas of equality. Her most recent work, Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried (Oxford, 2023) uncovers family dynamics beyond couplehood and parenthood to reveal how unmarried or childless people shaped family life, childrearing, and genealogical practices in the eighteenth century.
In the Latter-day Saint context, she has spoken and written on the history of genealogical practices and their impact on social and familial relationships. In 2017 she delivered a BYU forum talk about genealogical consciousness titled, somewhat inexplicably, “How dead cats, your siblings, eighteenth-century English clergy, making lists, TED talks, evolutionary biology, Susa Young Gates, and my mom can save the world from being utterly wasted.” Her contribution to the Neal A Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship’s series, Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants, Redeeming the Dead, will appear in late 2024.
Prof. Harris has completed fellowships at the Center for 17th and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA's William Andrews Clark Library and the Newberry Library in Chicago. In 2024 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Prof. Harris teaches European and British history, introductory genealogical methods, English paleography, and advanced British genealogical methodology courses. She also posts about family history and genealogy on Instagram @familyhistoryprof.