Meet the Surgery & Emotion project team.

Michael is Lecturer in Modern British History at Lancaster Univerity, having until 2022 been Reader in History in the Department of Humanities at the University of Roehampton. Between 2016 and 2021 he was Principal Investigator on the Surgery & Emotion project.  He has written extensively on the history of medical identity, performance, and self-representation, as well as gender, war and militarism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is the author of the book Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c.1760-1850 (Manchester University Press, 2011) and co-editor of Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2019). His research for the Surgery & Emotion project has explored the embodied emotions of Romantic surgery, the relations between surgery, emotion, and war in early nineteenth-century Britain and had led to a major monograph with Cambridge University Press entitled Emotions and Surgery in Britian, 1793-1912 (2022).

James is Senior Research Fellow on the Surgery & Emotion project. He has written extensively on the history of medicine and emotions, notably in his monograph Bad Vibrations. Before starting at Roehampton, he worked at Oxford, Stanford, Durham, Newcastle, Groningen and Vienna. His current project deals with manly fortitude in military surgery in the context of race, class and empire.

Lauren is a PhD candidate exploring nineteenth-century surgery and emotion, with a focus on material culture, human remains, and the medical body on display. She was previously Curator at the Thackray Medical Museum where she cared for medical material culture dating from Roman times to the present day. Lauren has a background in archaeology from the University of Manchester, and her MA thesis explored human remains in archaeological collections and the ethical implications in displaying them. In 2017 she was awarded a place on the Museums Association Transformers programme, a network which encourages new thinking and change in the museum and heritage sector. 

David is the Research and Engagement Fellow on the Surgery & Emotion project. His research examines the complex relationships between homeless patients, medical researchers, and surgeons in both historical and contemporary contexts. He is also responsible for the project’s engagement and outreach activities, facilitating interactions between surgeons, patients, academics, and policymakers. In addition, he manages the project’s website and social media.

David completed his PhD at Queen Mary University of London in 2020 and has an MSc in the history of science, technology, and medicine from the University of Manchester. He has previously published on pacifism and medical research during the Second World War and representations of women’s labour in post-war neuroscience.

From 2017 to 2020, Agnes was the project’s Research Fellow, exploring the role of emotions in contemporary British surgery. Blending the medical humanities with the history of emotions, she utilised oral history methods alongside written sources to examine how sorrow, joy, grief, guilt, and compassion shape the personal and professional landscape of modern operative practice. From October 2019, Agnes also served as the project’s Engagement Fellow, managing the project’s engagement and outreach activities as well as its website and social media. While working on the project, Agnes published on death and dying in the contemporary British operating theatre, post-war medical romance fiction, and doctors’ ‘wellbeing’ both past and present.

Agnes completed her PhD at King’s College London in 2017 and has an MSc in the history of science, technology, and medicine from Imperial College/UCL. Her first book, The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021.

Alison Moulds was Engagement Fellow on Surgery & Emotion from 2017 to 2019, organising the project’s engagement and outreach activities with practitioners and the public and looking after its website and social media. During this time, Alison also worked as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the European Research Council-funded Diseases of Modern Life project at the University of Oxford and as Engagement and Impact Manager on the Living with Feeling project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, at Queen Mary University of London. 

Alison completed her DPhil in English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her thesis looked at the construction of medical identities in print culture from the 1830s to the 1910s. A monograph based on this research is under contract with Palgrave.