Dr Susannah Wilson

Research interests

My research interests focus on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French history, culture, and literature. I have published on medical and cultural history; women's lives and writing; sex, gender, pathology and criminality; the history of the French psychological sciences; and different forms of self-writing (correspondence, memoir, etc.)

My next book will be published with Cornell University Press in 2025, under the title A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France. It is a microhistory of an obscure murder case that briefly caused sensation in 1880s Dijon. The book explores the psychology and culture of motherhood, childbirth and child loss, poverty and dispossession, and taboos around female violence.

My first book, Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920Link opens in a new window (Oxford University Press, 2010) investigated the lives and writings of a number of women incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In 2018 I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to write a cultural history of morphine in France from c. 1870-1940. The first output from this project is my forthcoming monograph, A Most Quiet Murder (see above). I am also preparing a second monograph on literary representations of morphine use and abuse in France from 1870 to the 1930s. The idea for my book on morphine addiction in France grew out of a previous research project, a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship which I held from 2011-2014 and which focused on the suffering body in women's writing. I have been invited to present papers and presentations on these research findings at conferences and seminars in Warwick, Oxford, London, Paris, Mexico City and elsewhere.

In March 2015 I was awarded a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award to fund and facilitate a series of events on the subject of 'Cultures of Addiction since 1800'. This research network has resulted in the publication of a sole-edited book, Prohibitions and Psychoactive Substances in History, Culture and TheoryLink opens in a new window, published with Routledge in 2019.

I am also interested in oral history and the recording of women's lives, and I have written for non-academic audiences on this subject. My recent book, Now We Are Forty (2023), traces the lives of a small group of British women born in the 1970s who reached middle age in the late 2010s. It is available in paperback and on Kindle and has some good reviews on Amazon!

I welcome enquiries from potential MA and PhD students looking to work in my area of research specialism.

Outside Warwick, I am a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Modern and Contemporary France and I am a trustee and Treasurer for the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes.

I also have three years of secondary-school teaching experience in state and private schools.

Teaching and supervision

• French translation
• FR326: The City of Paris and the Modern Imagination
• FR200: Childhood and Memory in Modern French Literature
• PhD and MA (research) supervision:
  • Ambra Minoli
  • Alicja Matuszewska
  • Abigail Coppins (completed 2025)
  • Charles Marshall

Administrative roles

• SMLC Director of Student Wellbeing (Senior Tutor) (2024-)
• Head of French Studies (2020-2023)
• Senior Tutor in French (2016-18)

Publications

Books:

• A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell University Press: Forthcoming, December 2025). Monograph.
• Prohibitions and Psychoactive Substances in History, Culture and Theory (London: Routledge, 2019). Edited book.
• Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2010). Monograph.

Current book project:

• Morphine Manias: Narratives of Addiction in French Literature and History, 1870-1930. Monograph (in preparation).

Books for a non-academic audience:

• Now We Are Forty: Conversations With Women (2023). Available to read here.

Articles and book chapters (peer reviewed):

• 'Two Generations of British Women', Oral History, Spring 2024, vol. 52, no. 1. (March/April 2024).
• ‘To whom does a Letter Belong? Psychopathology and Epistolography in the Asylum Letters of Antonin Artaud and Camille Claudel’, Modern Languages Open, 2021, vol. 1, no. 1: 1-18.
• ‘Morphinisé/morphinomane/morphinée: cultural representations of a French opioid crisis, 1870–1940’. Contemporary French Civilization, vol. 44, no. 4 (2019): 332-357.
• ‘A Medicine for the Soul: Morphine and Prohibition in the French Cultural Imagination, 1870-1916,’ in Susannah Wilson (ed.) Prohibitions and Psychoactive Substances in History, Culture and Theory (London: Routledge, 2019): 51-70.
• ‘Introduction,’ in Susannah Wilson (ed.) Prohibitions and Psychoactive Substances in History, Culture and Theory (London: Routledge, 2019): 1-9.
• ‘Emaciation as a Subversive Strategy in the Goncourts’ Renée Mauperin and an Early Case of Hysterical Anorexia,’ in Medicine and Maladies: Representing Affliction in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Sophie Leroy (Leiden: Brill, 2018): 154-170.
• ‘Gender, Genius and the Artist’s Double Bind: The Letters of Camille Claudel, 1880-1910,’ Modern Language Review, Vol. 112, No. 2 (April 2017): 362-80.
• ‘Anorexia and its Metaphors,’ Exchanges, Vol. 3, No. 2 (April 2016): 216-226.
• ‘The Iconography of Anorexia Nervosa in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Picturing Women’s Health, ed. by Kate Scarth, et al. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014): 77-104.
• ‘Writing from the Asylum: Re-assessing the Voices of Female Patients in the History of Psychiatry in France’, in Being Human: Reflections on Mental Distress in Society, ed. by Alastair Morgan (Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books, 2011): 99-109.

Reviews:

• Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914: Strangers in Paradise, by Karen L. Carter and Susan Waller (eds), Modern & Contemporary France, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2016): 336-337.

• Suzanne Noël: Cosmetic Surgery, Feminism and Beauty in Early Twentieth-Century France, by Paula J. Martin, Gender and History, Volume 28, Issue 1 (April 2016): 227–228.

• Without Ground: Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity, by Calum Neill, French Studies, Vol. 69, No. 3 (2015): 413-414.

• Stendhal's Less-Loved Heroines: Fiction, Freedom, and the Female, by Maria C. Scott, Modern Language Review, Vol. 109, No. 4 (2014): 1084-1085.

• The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Toward a Political History of Madness, by Laure Murat,Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol 43, No. 3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 2015): 1259.

• Autour de l’extrême littéraire, ed. by Alastair Hemmens and Russell Williams, French Studies, Vol. 67, No. 4 (2013): 582-583

Translations:

• I provided new translations from the French for a Penguin Classics edition of Charles Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (2005), ed. by Dr Michael Neve and Dr Sharon Messenger of the Wellcome Trust Centre for History of Medicine, UCL.

Engagement

• Regular peer reviewer and book reviewer for specialist academic journals in my field, including French Studies, Modern and Contemporary France, Contemporary French Civilization, Nineteenth-Century French Studies.
• In 2023, I gave three talks to members of the public (a book launch in London, to women's book groups in Surrey, and at the Warwick Oral History Network seminar) about my book, Now We Are Forty.
• In September 2019 I was invited to appear as an expert contributor to a programme aired on the Yesterday Channel series 'Murder Maps'. The episode looked at the case of the French serial killer Henri Landru and his crimes against French women.
• I was also awarded funding from the AHRC 10th Anniversary Cultural Engagement Fund and from the Warwick Institute of Advanced Study to run a series of public engagement events linked to the BA 'Addiction and Culture' project.
• Of the events funded by the AHRC award, the 'Psychoactive Supper' event in London was covered by the BBC 'The World Tonight', The Times, and The New Scientist: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/news/prohibition2016/banningpleasure/supper/https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/news/prohibition2016/banningpleasure/mediainfo
• We also held a public evening of panel discussion on the subject of Psychoactivity and the Law: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/news/prohibition2016/banningpleasure/panel/
• In 2014 and 2012 I gave two lectures followed by day-long seminars on Hersilie Rouy and Camille Claudel as part of a London-based series for existential and phenomenological psychotherapists and members of the public (‘Locked Up: “Patients” and their Gaolers’), organised by Anthony Stadlen: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/p/locked-up-patients-and-their-gaolers.html

Qualifications

BA, MA (Manchester), Licence ès Lettres Modernes (Bourgogne), D.Phil (Oxford)

Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA, AdvanceHE)