email: k.angel@qmul.ac.uk
Katherine received her PhD from the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge University, after which she held a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University. She is currently completing a monograph on ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction’ in psychiatry. Her research has been published in History of the Human Sciences, Biosocieties, and Current Opinion in Psychiatry, and her writing has appeared in Prospect, The New Statesman, The Independent, and Aeon magazine. Her work of literary non-fiction on sexuality and feminism, Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult To Tell, is published by Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the USA.

Research interests:
Katherine’s new project challenges emerging orthodoxies about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The DSM is widely seen as the agent of a standardized classification increasingly exported globally, and the DSM-III of 1980 as having categorically overturned psychoanalytic formulations. By providing a more detailed account of the DSM’s historical development – with a particular emphasis on the somatoform disorders in the manual – and by widening the frame of analysis to include the WHO’s International Classification of Disease, the project will complicate these narratives, charting the intertwined development of psychiatric ontology and politics of international coordination in the ‘West’. It will in the process redress an overly narrow focus on American sources in the scholarship on ‘Western’ psychiatry.

Publications:
Angel, K. (2012), Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult To Tell (Penguin, Allen Lane, UK; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, USA; Klett-Cotta/Tropen, Germany; De Bezige Bij, Netherlands).

Angel, K. (2012): ‘Contested Psychiatric Ontology and Feminist Critique: “Female Sexual Dysfunction” and the DSM’, History of the Human Sciences, 25 (4), 3-24.

Angel. K. (2013) ‘The Enthrallment of Neuroscience: Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina: A New Biography”‘. The Lancet, 381, p. 1352.

Angel. K. (2010): ‘The History of Female Sexual Dysfunction as a “Mental Disorder” in the Twentieth Century’, Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 23(6), pp. 536-541.

Angel, K. (2009): ‘The Precautions of Clinical Waste: Disposable Medical Sharps in the United Kingdom’, Biosocieties, 4 (2&3), pp. 183-205.

Angel. K.. Jones, E., Neve, M. (2003, Eds.) European Psychiatry on the Eve of War: Aubrey Lewis, the Maudsley Hospital and the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, Medical History Supplement 22).

See also other pieces of non-academic writing via katherineangel.com