糖心视频

Doctor Elsa Richardson

Senior Lecturer

History

Contact

Personal statement

I currently hold a Chancellor鈥檚 Fellowship in the History of Health and Wellbeing at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH). Working at the intersection between the medical and cultural history, my research considers the relation of heterodox practices, beliefs and movements to mainstream society and culture, with particular focus on the interaction between medicine and the imagination, science and the supernatural, psychology and the occult. My current research examines histories of nutrition, vegetarianism, other alternative dietary cultures, mental stress and gastric disorders in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain

Recent research projects have examined Edwardian health reformers, the history of the radical publisher C.W. Daniel, interwar life reformers and health exhibitions in Victorian London. Currently working on a popular history of the gut-brain connection and cultures of digestion more widely.聽

My first monograph, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017, examined the place of extraordinary visionary experience in the Victorian scientific and popular imaginary. Specifically, it investigated the phenomenon of second sight, a species of foreknowledge associated with the Scottish Highlands and Islands and described how tales of this strange visionary ability came to impact on the formation of psychological theories, scientific methodologies and dominant cultural forms. Outside of these projects, I have also researched and published on women鈥檚 life writing, British modernism, vegetarianism in fiction, performance and psychology, feminist consciousness-raising and psychoanalysis.

In addition to lecturing in the history of medicine at the 糖心视频 and developing my own research, I also curate arts and science events for public institutions. Working with an arts curator, Alice Carey, I have programmed several large-scale events at the Wellcome Collection in London. In 2018/19 I was named one of the BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinkers.

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Publications

Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciences Rethinking the Specialization Thesis (2024) (2024)
(2024)
Aries Vol 22, pp. 136-154 (2021)
Literature and Medicine Vol 39, pp. 133-153 (2021)
Victorian Review Vol 45, pp. 117-134 (2019)
The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 (2019) (2019)

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Teaching

I have experience teaching on the history of medicine and the history of psychiatry, and I have co-authored undergraduate courses on the history of the supernatural and the history of the modern self. At Strathclyde I teach on 'Madness and Society', convene second-year course, 'Disease and Society' and a fourth-year special subject 'From Ancient Passions to Modern Feelings: The History of Emotions'.聽

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Research Interests

Science and the supernatural, the history of psychiatiry and psychology, vegetarianism, utopian social movements, stress and the stomach, work and food, second-wave feminism and psychoanalysis.

Professional Activities

Recipient
13/8/2024
Recipient
22/7/2024
Participant
16/7/2024
Recipient
2/7/2024
Recipient
30/5/2024
Speaker
8/10/2023

Projects

Richardson, Elsa (Principal Investigator)
I am the Co-Director, with Dr Janet Greelees at Glasgow Caledonian University, of the CSHHH
01-Jan-2023
Richardson, Elsa (Principal Investigator)
31-Jan-2022 - 30-Jan-2022
Richardson, Elsa (Principal Investigator)
I was Co-I on a Royal Society of Edinburgh funded Research Network with Dr Manon Mathius (University of Glasgow).
01-Jan-2021 - 01-Jan-2023
Richardson, Elsa (Principal Investigator)
01-Jan-2019 - 30-Jan-2025
Richardson, Elsa (Principal Investigator)
01-Jan-2017 - 31-Jan-2019

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Contact

Doctor Elsa Richardson
Senior Lecturer
History

Email: elsa.richardson@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 444 8243