People

Ollie Brown

Ollie is the Engagement and Impact Manager on the Living With Feeling project. His background is in public engagement, having previously held impact and external engagement roles at the University of Exeter.

Before joining the LWF team, Ollie completed an MA in Transnational Studies at UCL.

If you are interested in working with the team, please email Ollie at o.brown@qmul.ac.uk

Elena Carrera

Elena Carrera is Co-Investigator on Living With Feeling, Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions.

Current Research

• History of ideas
• Critical theory
• Early modern autobiography
• Gender and power in early modern Spain
• History of madness
• The emotions in medieval and early modern Europe.

Sarah Chaney

Sarah Chaney is a Research Fellow on the Living With Feeling project with research interests in emotions in the history of nursing. Her background is in museums and public engagement, and she currently runs the events and exhibitions programme at the Royal College of Nursing. She previously worked at Bethlem Museum of the Mind

Current research

• The history of self-inflicted injury and suicidal behaviour
• Patient narratives in mental health care
• The history of psychotherapy
• The history of nursing

Thomas Dixon

Thomas Dixon is Principal Investigator on the Living With Feeling project. He was Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at QMUL until 2017 and teaches courses on the cultural and intellectual history of Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Current research

• The history of anger as a scientific, philosophical, medical, and moral category.
• The history of the idea of ‘appropriate emotion’.
• Emotional health in history, philosophy, and experience.

Past research

• Tears and weeping, especially in Britain, since the middle ages.
• The invention of ‘altruism’ and Victorian moral thought.
• The history of ‘emotion’ as a psychological category.

Jules Evans

Jules Evans is research fellow on the Living With Feeling project. He is also an experienced journalist, BBC New Generation Speaker and practical philosopher, working with organisations including Saracens RFC and the Civil Service.  He blogs at www.philosophyforlife.org and is on twitter @julesevans11

Current Research

• Ecstatic experiences, their history and their place in modern culture
• The centrality of ecstatic or trance experiences to the arts
• The revival of contemplation in western culture
• The psychedelic renaissance
• Ancient Greek philosophy,  CBT, and the modern politics of well-being.

Rhodri Hayward

Rhodri Hayward is Co-Investigator on Living With Feeling and Co-Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions. He is a Reader in History and researches the relationship between the mind sciences and popular practices of self transformation.  To this end he has worked and published on the histories of dreams, cybernetics, demonology, neuroscience, psychiatric epidemiology, Pentecostalism and the relations between psychiatry and primary care.  He is particularly interested in how people engage with the experience of time and the relationship between these engagements and material culture.  As part of the Living With Feeling project he will be pursuing this question through a history of self-help and tidying up.

Current Research

• The history of tidying up and its relationship to subjectivity, temporality and material culture.
• The disruptive history of time slips, hauntings and prophecies.
• Political histories of anxieties and depression

Past  Research

• Popular religion, prophecy and the invention of the unconscious
• Neuroscience, cybernetics and strategies of self-transformation.
• The history of the happiness agenda and the role of emotions in opening up new areas for political contestation

Emma Sutton

Emma Sutton worked as a documentary film-maker at the BBC for ten years, before completing a Wellcome-funded MA and PhD in the history of medicine. She is a post-doctoral researcher and Co-ordinator for Public Engagement on the Living With Feeling project.

Current Research

• Twentieth-century child-rearing ideas and practices
• Late-nineteenth and twentieth-century theories of psychological development
• Emotional expression and health

Past Research

• The American philosopher and and psychologist William James (1842-1910)
• Concepts of health in nineteenth-century Britain and America
• The history of ideas about the subconscious and unconscious mind

Tiffany Watt Smith

Current Research

• The history of involuntary mimicry, from Phrenology to Mirror Neurons
• Emotions, moods and the inanimate world
• The cultural history of sleep.

Past Research

• Flinching and wincing
• Performance and theatre in psychological and neurological experiments from Darwin to WWI
• Ethnographies of emotions.

PhD Students

Ed Brooker 

Ed Brooker began his PhD on the Living With Feeling project in October 2017.  He completed his BA in History at the University of Cambridge, and holds master’s degrees from both Durham University and Birkbeck, University of London.  His work examines the relationship between conceptions of happiness, emotional well-being, and the urban ideal in the context of late Victorian London.

Edgar Gerrard Hughes

Edgar Gerrard Hughes began his PhD on the Living With Feeling project in October 2016. He completed his BA History at the University of Oxford and his MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History at Queen Mary University of London. His project explores theories of grief and practices of grieving in Victorian Britain.

Evelien Lemmens

Evelien Lemmens started her PhD on the Living With Feeling project in October 2016. She completed her BA History at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and her MA History at Queen Mary University of London. Her thesis focuses on digestive and emotional health in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Catherine Maguire

Catherine took her BA in Modern and Medieval Languages from Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, and her MPhil with distinction in Medieval and Early Modern European Literature from Clare College, University of Cambridge. She is originally from Northern Ireland and her academic interests lie in motherhood, female religious experience and medicine in the medieval and early modern periods. Her project explores the physical and emotional inflections of motherhood in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain.

David Saunders

David Saunders started his PhD, which intersects with the Living With Feeling project, in October 2016. He completed his BA at King’s College London in 2014 and his MSc at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at the University of Manchester in 2016. His thesis addresses the emotional encounters between medical researchers and their experimental subjects during the Second World War, and the impact of these relationships on questions of citizenship, sacrifice, and belonging. He also worked on the history of neuroscience and the emotions as a Wellcome Secondment Fellow at the Science Museum, London.