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 constantly shifting constellation of social, cultural and political ideologies and circumstances.
But there are reverberations.
And these serve as warning bells to us in this moment.
For me, being a historian involves dissolving traditional idea of linear time. We bring the past – and some would argue the future – into the present.
However objective we try to be, when we think and write about ‘the past’ we cannot help bringing ourselves into that process. We cannot separately the subjective from the objective.
All exist simultaneously.
Social & Cultural Historian
I am a social and cultural historian working primarily on the histories of psychiatry and the emotions.
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I am interested in how the cultural meanings we give to certain mind/body events, such as pain, or to certain spaces, such as a hospital ward, shape our lived experiences. How does that change over time and in different environments?
My main areas of interest are:​
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Institutional cultures
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'Madness' & psychiatry
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Pain & the emotions
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Death, dying & loss
Working against the grain
​I spend much of my time sitting on uncomfortable chairs in chilly archives trawling through documents from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Most record the views of doctors, lawyers and government officials.
But what about everyone else?
What were their experiences? How did they think and feel?
What are we not being told? What is unseen, and unheard?
Where are the gaps? Where are the silences?
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Day Room, St Luke's Hospital
Pink mittens - essential archive attire
