People

Kate Lister is intellectually slutty. She spends most of her time peeping up the skirts of history and reporting what she finds to over 180,000 follows on Twitter as @WhoresofYore. Kate has been fascinated by sex ever since she found a stash of porn mags in a hedge, on the way to school and Stewart Riley gave her two sherbet dib-dabs and a glitter pen to be allowed to look at them. Had she not been able to channel this interest into an academic discipline, she may very well have wound up a porn baron. Thankfully, she is now a lecturer at Leeds Trinity University, where she researches the history of sexuality and curates the online research project Whores of Yore. Whores of Yore is a digital public engagement project that works to make research on sexuality and the history of sex work accessible to the public. The project creates space for the voices of academics, sex workers, activists, artists, therapists and historians to stand alongside one another and work towards joining up conversations around sexuality. Kate is also a columnist for inews where she writes about the history of sex, covering such diverse subjects as medieval impotence tests and the forgotten custom of baking bread with your genitals. She is also a staunch ally in the fight for sex worker rights and a board member of the International Sex Work Research Hub and an advocate for Basis Sex Work Project in Yorkshire, a charity supporting sex workers.