History helps us to understand how the past has shaped the world we live in today.
It never repeats itself because every event evolves within a shifting constellation of social, cultural and political discourses and circumstances.
But there are reverberations.
And these serve as warnings for us now.
Social & cultural historian
I work primarily on the histories of psychiatry and the emotions.​
I am interested in the changing meanings of care as they are constituted and experienced through different cultural mechanisms - language, space, time, objects, systems and practices – in institutions of care.
My main areas of interest are:​​
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Institutional cultures
'Madness' & psychiatry
Pain & the emotions
Death, dying & loss
Day Room, St Luke's Hospital
Working against the grain
​I spend much of my time sitting on uncomfortable chairs in chilly archives trawling through documents that have been rescued from damp basements.
Most record the views of doctors, lawyers and government officials.
But what about the voices of everyone else?
What were their experiences? How did they think and feel?
Where are the gaps? Where are the silences?​