Eleanor studied History at BA (2009) and MA (2011) level at Queen Mary University of London, developing an interest in the place of children in the histories of medicine, psychiatry and crime. Her BA thesis entitled, ‘Who Will Help: The Impact of the 1866 Cholera Epidemic on the Children of East London’, was awarded the Francis Clarke Memorial prize and Eleanor won the Longman/History Today Undergraduate Thesis Award in 2009. Her Wellcome-funded MA dissertation combined the histories of childhood and psychiatry in an analysis of child patients residing in Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1851-1871. By focusing on a group of patients that had previously received little historical attention the dissertation questioned a number of orthodoxies within the history of psychiatry.

Research interests:
Thesis title: ‘Children Who Kill: Responses of a Victorian Society, 1816-1908’.

Eleanor continues to focus on children within the histories of medicine, psychiatry, and crime at PhD level. In her Wellcome-funded project she utilises a wide range of sources including newspapers, court records, parliamentary papers, medical, religious, and fictional literature, and the returns of debating societies to examine how Victorian society responded when children were charged with felonious killing offences. At a time when there existed strict rules for the expression of emotion and notions of the innocence of childhood, children who killed or murdered posed an ideological threat to society. By focusing on a variety of responses to cases of children who killed in the nineteenth century Eleanor aims to illustrate how Victorian society sought to understand and protect itself from the existence of children who killed.

Eleanor is also currently running the Historical Research Forum and Seminar alongside Craig Griffiths and Dana Smith. She belongs to the Centre for the History of Emotions (Queen Mary) and the Centre for the History of Childhood and Youth (Oxford).