Dr Andrew Burchell from the Department of History will seek to ground the profession’s development in tandem with the demands, activism and critiques emanating from people who stammer. His Fellowship ‘The Child’s Speech: Speech Therapy, Stammering and Activism in Britain, c.1906-2000' encompassing the early-twentieth-century peddlers of ‘stammering cures’ (who claimed to be ‘self-cured’) or elocutionist treatments developed by actors (including Lionel Logue himself).

The project will follow these through to the gradual introduction of speech therapy at the level of local state and the School Medical Services, and onwards to the late-twentieth-century creation of the British Stammering Association (founded in 1978 and rebranded as Stamma in 2019), and the embracing of a neurodivergent identity.

The project grounds speech therapy and stammering as co-constituted, and queries where the margins of medical authority and patient expertise lie.