I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Professor Hilary Marland’s project ‘The Last Taboo of Motherhood?: Postnatal Mental Disorders in Twentieth-Century Britain’, funded by a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award.

My project strand explores the theme ‘Sufferers and their Publics: Experiencing and Narrating Postnatal Mental Illness’. I address the ways in which mothers (and more recently partners, including fathers) described their own experiences of mental illness, and how the 'public' responded. I draw on a wide range of books (letters, memoirs and autobiographies), magazines and newspaper articles, audio-visual sources (from radio to television and film) and oral history interviews.

For more information, see our project website.

My first monograph explores The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed in Britain: Tanning Culture from Fad to Fear (Bloomsbury, December 2024). For more information about my PhD project on the history of tanning culture, click here.

The Wellcome Trust have kindly funded both my postgraduate and postdoctoral research.

Employment

• 2021-2024: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, ‘The Last Taboo of Motherhood?: Postnatal Mental Disorders in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick.
• 2020-2021: Medical Humanities China-UK (MHCUK) Early Career Fellowship, Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH), Universities of Strathclyde, Manchester and Shanghai.
• June-August 2020: Early Career Fellowship, Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), University of Warwick.
• April-July 2019: Wellcome Trust Secondment Fellowship at Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), Westminster.
• 2014–2015: Cover Teacher, Toot Hill Secondary School/College, Nottingham.

Education

• 2016–2020: Medical Humanities PhD, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick.
• 2015-2016: MA History of Medicine, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick
• 2011-2014: BA Combined Honours: History and Music, University of Liverpool.

Publications

Book

• The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed in Britain: Tanning Culture from Fad to Fear (Bloomsbury, December 2024).

Book Chapters

• ‘Talk Shows and “Tanorexia”: Motherhood and Sunbed Addiction on British TV in the 1990s’ in Tracey Loughran, Daisy Payling and Kate Mahoney (eds), 'Everyday health', embodiment, and selfhood since 1950 (Manchester University Press, submitted 2021, October 2024).

• ‘Sunbeds, Dihydroxyacetone (DHA) Fake Tan and MelonoTan Injections: A History of 'Safe' Tanning Technologies' in Rachel Elder and Thomas Schlich (eds), Technology and Health in the Age of Patient Consumerism (Manchester University Press, submitted 2021, February 2025).

Journal Articles

• 'Nemone Lethbridge's Play Baby Blues on BBC Television: Maternal Mental Illness Narratives, Stigma and Support in 1970s Britain' (Women's History Review, 2024).
• 'Postnatal Depression on the BBC's Woman’s Hour in Twentieth Century Britain: Narratives, Treatment and Reception' (submitted).
• ‘From 'Immoral' Users to 'Sunbed Addicts': The Media- Medical Pathologising Of Working-Class Consumers and Young Women in Late Twentieth-Century England’, Social History of Medicine, Volume 35, Issue 3, (2022), pp.770-92.

Policy Reports

• (co-authored with Hilary Marland) 'Improving Maternity Care through Women's Voices: The Women's Health Strategy Continues a Long Process for Advocacy', History & Policy, 15 February 2023.
• (co-authored with Rowena Bermingham) 'Improving Witness Testimony', Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (July 2019).

Book Reviews

• Jessica Borge, Protective Practices: A History of the London Rubber Company and the Condom Business (McGill-Queens University Press, 2020) in Cultural and Social History (2022).
• 'The 'Sedimented Meanings and Compounded Politics' of Skin Lighteners’ for Lynn M. Thomas, Beneath the surface: A transnational history of skin lighteners (Duke University Press, 2020) in Metascience (History of Science and Technology), Volume 29, (2020).
• Tania Anne Woloshyn, Soaking up the Rays: Light Therapy and Visual Culture in Britain, C. 1890-1940 (University of Manchester Press, 2017)' in Social History of Medicine, Volume 32, Issue 2, (2019).