Sue Heath

Sue Heath is a Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences. She served as Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research in the Faculty of Humanities between 2020 and 2023, and as Deputy Associate Dean PGR and Director of Methods North West between 2018 and 2020. She is also a former co-director of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, and has been a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences since 2016.

Sue was an undergraduate at the University of Bristol, and studied for her PhD at Lancaster University. After working as a researcher in various posts around the North West, she started her lecturing career in the Department of Sociology at UoM in the mid-1990s. In 1998 she moved to the University of Southampton, where latterly she was the Co-Director of two ESRC Research Centres: the National Centre for Research Methods and the Centre for Population Change. She moved back to the University of Manchester in 2010 to take up Co-Directorship of the Morgan Centre.

Sue Heath’s main research interests revolve around the themes of housing, home and everyday domesticity, with a particular focus on practices of home-making and cultures of everyday life in shared living arrangements, and the housing pathways and intergenerational dependencies of ‘Generation Rent'. Amongst other externally funded projects, she has led on two ESRC-funded projects focused on shared living arrangements, including the 'Under the Same Roof' project, which focused on the everyday relational practices of contemporary communal living, and culminated in the book 'Shared Housing, Shared Lives: Everyday Experiences across the Lifecourse' (Routledge, 2018), as well as in other project publications.

Sue's interest in these issues have in recent years taken a historical turn, as since 2021 she has been conducting research into the social and cultural history of student living arrangements in the civic university sector, set against the changing nature of access to higher education as a consequence of the shift from an 'elite' to a 'mass' university sector over the course of the last century. Sue has been working with a range of archival sources, including university administrative records, the student press, official reports and enquiries, first-hand accounts, academic research of the day, and a variety of cultural sources. This project has combined Sue's expertise in housing studies and the sociology of youth with her earlier parallel research interests in the sociology of education. She was the recipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the 2024/25 academic year, during which time she worked on a monograph entitled 'Redbricks and Mortar: Accommodating Students in the English Civic Universities', which is due to be published by Manchester University Press in 2027. In March 2025, Sue had a paper on students lodgings published in the journal History of Education.

Throughout her career, Sue has also had strong methodological interests, with a particular focus on research ethics and creative qualitative methods. In 2015/16, Sue was the academic lead in a year-long collaboration between the Morgan Centre and Lynne Chapman, a Sheffield-based artist and 'Urban Sketcher'. As a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence, Lynne created a visual record of everyday life in the Morgan Centre, whilst together Lynne, Sue and other Morgan Centre members explored the potential of observational sketching as a social science research tool. A journal article on the lessons we learnt from the residency is located here, and Sue and Lynne also have a chapter on sketching in the edited collection 'Mundane Methods'.

Please note that, as Sue now only works restricted hours, she is no longer accepting PhD students.