2025- Women in the Private Asylum Business in England, 1600-1890: ‘Lady Speculators’?
Working with Len Smith,this book project is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for publication in 2027/8. It is the first substantial and comparative study of women as proprietors in the 'mad business'. It demonstrates that women were actors, and not only or always victims, in the long history of psychiatry. We argue that senior and independent women have been overlooked by Whig and 'great men' histories, and also by 'history from below', as they have not fitted neatly into either reading.
Embracing the diversity of the women and premises involved in England across three centuries, this book maps the role of proprietresses in the trade in lunacy and their impact on patient care and medically related practice. In doing so, it demonstrates the centrality of women to the familial model of asylum care, as well as their role in specialist provision for women patients and people with learning disabilities. Competition with medical men was ever-present, especially after the introduction of practitioner licensing from 1858, which aimed to shut women out of seniority in medicine. But they persisted.
The lives and illnesses of private asylum patients are a mystery relative to those in public institutions. Whereas historians have been able to mine the voluminous records kept by county, borough and city asylums, few case notes from private facilities survive, and those from women-run institutions are virtually non-existent. Our study steps into this space and begins peopling it. Embracing reports from the government inspectorate, newspapers, printed ephemera, national and local lunacy documentation, Quarter Sessions records and genealogical methodologies, this study centres on women’s experiences and in particular women who have been overlooked by the historiography.
2023- Policing Mental Disorder in London and Amsterdam since 1945
In the UK in 2018, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services declared that ‘too many aspects of the broader mental health system are broken; the police are left to pick up the pieces.’ In the Netherlands, too, policing has struggled to meet changing needs and circumstances. We do not know how this all happened culturally, nor how this heritage can be unpicked to enable new thinking and policy; there has never been a comprehensive historical investigation of policing and ‘mental disorder’, a term traditionally embracing mental illness and learning disabilities—this project is the first.
Beginning in 1945, the research will transform the histories of psychiatry, mental health and learning disabilities, breaking them away from institutional and clinical contexts and towards everyday life in streets and homes. The two city case studies of London and Amsterdam will reveal these face-to-face encounters. Archival and newspaper sources will provide insights around how age, gender, race, class and experience produced local outcomes. Ascertaining these outcomes facilitates the comparative study of the two cities, and will show how culture and police involvement shaped modern mental healthcare in two nations.
2025-2026 Rethinking RECIST: The Origins, Impact, and Future of Modern Response Criteria in Cancer Trials, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Medical Center and the Netherlands Cancer Institute
This project takes as its cue the Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumours (RECIST), which is an internationally-recognised set of guidelines for clinicians. Whilst critics query its accuracy, it and other twentieth-century developments in thinking about and around disease progression in cancer, have dramatically changed treatments and their outcomes.
Working with the Amsterdam University Medical Center and Netherlands Cancer Institute, this interdisciplinary project represents a novel approach in oncology by examining the history of response criteria, the context out of which they were born, and the ramifications of their implementation across the oncological landscape. Understanding how guidelines have emerged could alter how scientists and clinicians work towards supporting their colleagues to refine decision-making and articulate the value of patients’ experiences in informing change.
2022-2023 The Causes of Mental Distress: Understanding Mental Health Past and Present, Wellcome funded
Research commissioned by Wellcome to inform and support mental health science strategy and research, and carried out by a team of historians, sociologists, psychiatrists and an artist. The project charted the key theories in mental health science today through a historical lens. As well as presenting a critical understanding of these theories, the team also foregrounded lesser-known approaches to mental health beyond science and medicine, including the contributions of the service user and survivor movements, of anthropology, transcultural psychiatry and the humanities. 'This context', Wellcome said, 'is essential for developing a shared understanding of mental health, building on existing theories and creating new ones.'
Collaborating with the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Birmingham, the University of Central Lancashire's MadZine project, McPin, and Mental Fight Club/Green Dragon Cafe, the team supproting the creation of zines and produced a report rooted in the insights of people with lived/living experience. The project produced an online timeline of theories about the causes of mental ill health, and the team have written three articles.
2021-2022 History of Sexuality Project, University of Birmingham
Research to ascertain what happened at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s in relation to attempts by staff to effect sexual and gender reorientation. The research revealed ‘aversion therapy’ was used by psychologists and psychiatrists to instill what they considered ‘regular heterosexual behaviour’ - often on men who had sex with men, and also on women attracted to women, and people who might now identify as trans - in a way that would now be considered a form of ‘conversion therapy’. The official report was published in June 2022. The report resulted in an institutional apology and is altering policy at the University, which has gained global press attention, view the articles published by news and media outlets:
2016-2021 “Forged by Fire’: Burns Injury and Identity in Britain, c.1800-2000’, AHRC Funded
Project that explored the role of burn injuries in developing and changing identities in Britain since 1800. Centring on three city case studies (Glasgow, Birmingham and London), this research considered how being burned or scalded impacted on individuals, communities and countries. As well as being responsible for Scottish research and that on ambulance, war, and psychological issues, I led on the exhibition and the accompanying public activity programme. First mounted physically at The Museum of the Order of St John, London, Forged by Fire investigates how burns have shaped identities.
2015-2016 ‘Quakers & the First World War: Lives & Legacies’, AHRC Funded
Working with volunteers, we co-produced four themed booklets (viewable via these embedded links): the Friends’ Ambulance Unit; Friends’ War Victims’ Relief Committee; Quakers on the Home Front; and Conscientious Objection and Conscription. We held at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery what, as far as we are aware, was the only prominent UK event to commemorate the centenary of conscription. We ran study days and supported skills-based development for volunteers. The booklets were sent to the 500+ Quaker Meeting Houses in the UK and prominent overseas sites linked with Friends, including Swarthmore and Earlham Colleges.
2015 ‘Women Doctors and the First World War’, Worcestershire World War 100
This research set out to discover more about the first woman doctor at Worcester Royal Infirmary, who was appointed during the First World War. The findings instead opened up the experience of Martha Jane Moody-Stewart and her fellow medical women in Ireland, England, Serbia and South Africa. The results were published in a booklet, viewable via the embedded link, and featured in a touring exhibition with The Infirmary and George Marshall Medical Museums.
2013-2015 ‘Quakers & the First World War: Faith & Action’, Central England Quakers
My research into the Friends’ Ambulance Unit began in preparation for the major six-month exhibition in 2015 at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. It was of central importance to Quakers in Britain and helped ensure that alternative voices were heard during the Centenary of the First World War. Reviews made clear its importance to Quakers and the public stories of the Centenary: it was deemed ‘outstanding’ (p.31) and ‘acclaimed for the high standard of its presentation … It deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible’ (Calon: Newsletter of the Meeting of Friends in Wales, 20, 2016, p.6). Indeed, so inspired were Quakers in Wales by the exhibition that the Welsh Centre for International Affairs and the Welsh Government board, Cymru’n Cofio Wales Remembers 1914-18, were involved in recreating the Birmingham exhibition’s success for the 2017 National Eisteddfod and nationwide tour.