The Malory Project 

This project provides transcriptions and visual images of Thomas Malory's Morte D’arthur and explores the possibility of interlinking them with other scholarly material, and creating a scriptable environment for collaborators.

For further information, please contact Dr Takako Kato (tk97@le.ac.uk).

Medicine, Psychiatry and American Culture

This current project constructs a cultural history of medicine, psychiatry and illness in the United States after World War II. Focusing particularly on the interface between medical developments and cultural representations of illness in the mass media, literature, film and visual art. This research uses a range of archival sources to explore the diversity of illness in the period 1945 to 1970, including:
• the Wellcome Trust,
• the National Library of Medicine in Washington DC,
• Duke University,
• the New York Academy of Medicine and
• the UCLA Film Archive.

For information on this area please contact Professor Martin Halliwell: mrh17@le.ac.uk.

Sentiment and Suffering in Romantic Military Art

An interdisciplinary project which examines how death and wounding on the field of battle was conceived in general terms in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a particular interested in representations/discussions of ordinary or ranking soldiers.

Attention is given to the anatomist and field surgeon Charles Bell alongside other 'military healers' in the Romantic period. This project is part of a broader exploration of the 'pre-history' of war trauma. Contact Professor

Philip Shaw: ps14@le.ac.uk

Women Surgeons, 1860 to 1918

This project examines women's place in the surgical revolution of the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond, and looks closely at the sort of operations women performed with reference to hospital records, case notes and medical research papers.

It also investigates the controversies provoked by the female surgeon in this period, both through the disdain of some medical men and disapproval from within the increasing community of women doctors.

This work builds upon research already completed on women scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, resulting in the monograph The Comet Sweeper: Caroline Herschel's Astronomical Ambition (2007), and the British Society for the History of Science's Singer Prize winning article for 2005 on Mary Somerville.

Contact Dr Claire Brock: cb178@le.ac.uk

Men in Nursing and the Victorian Gentle Man

Interested in professional and non-professional care in the nineteenth century, this project investigates masculine tactility through the long-occluded figure of the male nurse.

It draws upon a varied archive including conventionally literary texts, life writing, sanitation and public health debates, and material on the regulation and staffing of hospitals and lunatic asylums.

Contact Dr Holly Furneaux: hf35@le.ac.uk

'Show Me the Bone': Fossils, Palaeontology and Prehistoric Creatures in Nineteenth-Century British and American Culture 

This project examines the nineteenth-century fascination with the inductive methods which enabled palaeontologists to infer the existence of giant prehistoric creatures from just small fragments of their bones.

It explores how these seemingly miraculous feats were disseminated in print culture on both sides of the Atlantic, and aims to track how the burgeoning myth of reconstruction from a single bone continued to circulate in works of popular science, fiction, poetry and journalism long after the viability of the technique had been refuted by the rising school of Darwinian palaeontologists in the 1850s.

Importantly, these popular and literary versions of the myth are not dismissed as merely trivial and inconsequential, for their prevalence and persistence often obliged elite palaeontologists to curtail their research and instead to undertake their own popularizing activities in order to counter them.

As such, they afford a particularly telling instance of how the non-scientific public played a highly significant but still rarely recognized role in shaping science in the nineteenth century, as well as raising caveats concerning the so-called Darwinian Revolution.

Contact Dr Gowan Dawson: (gd31@le.ac.uk)

Reading, Newsgathering and Science in Samuel Pepys's Circle 

As part of work on reading behaviour in the late seventeenth century, this project takes in the reception and circulation of scientific works in print and manuscript.

As an early member (and subsequently a president) of the Royal Society, Pepys sought to keep himself informed about scientific developments and the latest technologies, particularly those relating to seamanship. His personal circumstances also led to a keen interest in medical works and devices. The project explores Pepys’s reading material in the context of the social and business networks which helped him to obtain and interpret these works.

Contact: Dr Kate Loveman: kate.loveman@le.ac.uk