Co-Directors

 

Lena Ferriday, History

Lena is a PhD Researcher in History working at the intersections of sensory and environmental histories. Her doctoral research examines the ways in which different uses of landscape – as workplace, leisure space or health environment – have conditioned historical actors’ embodied experiences of the worlds around them. Using nineteenth century Devon and Cornwall as a case study, it interrogates people’s understandings of their own bodies and the ways in which we communicate sensory perceptions to ask what it means to live collectively and diversely in richly sensuous rural places.

 

Andy Flack, History

Andy Flack is a Senior Lecturer in Modern and Environmental History whose research intersects animal studies, histories of the senses, and environmental history. He is currently work on the ways in which senses, technologies and diverse bodies interact in dark environments, from the night-time of the everyday through to the perpetual nights below ground. His previous work focused on histories of captivity, including multisensory modes of human-animal encounter in zoos across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

 

Members

 

Abs Ashley, English

 

Victoria Bates, History

 

Doug Battersby, English

 

Peter Baxter, History

 

Barbara Caddick, Medical School and History

 

Tim Cole, History

 

Peter Dent, History of Art

 

Lucy Donkin, History of Art

 

Marianna Dudley, History

 

Caitlin Duggan, History

I am an AHRC SWWDTP PhD Researcher in History exploring material cultures of the NHS hospital. My doctoral research utilises sensory and hospital histories alongside phenomenological approaches to material culture to understand embodied and affective relations to hospital objects and spaces. My research moves beyond the visual idea of hospitals and, in conjunction with the Science Museum Group, focuses on how historic objects felt, smelled, and sounded. In doing so, I am considering how hospital spaces have been shaped by objects as ‘things’ felt, and how this can speak to national narratives of change in hospital spaces as well as local stories of individual experiences.

 

Natalie Ferris, English

 

Rebecka Fleetwood-Smith, History

 

Kate Guthrie, Music

 

Freya Gowrley, History of Art and Liberal Arts

 

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, English

 

Jimmy Hay, Film and Television

 

Susan Harrow, French

 

Laurence Kent, Film and Television

 

Simeon Koole, History and Liberal Arts

 

Catherine Lamont-Robinson, Medical School

 

John Lyons, History

 

Stephen Mawdsley, History

 

Georgia Nelson, Cabot Institute

 

Patricia Neville, Dental School

 

Milo Newman, Geography

 

Eugenia Nicolaci, Classics and Ancient History

 

Ellen O’Gorman, Classics and Ancient History

 

Joan Passey, English

 

Merle Patchett, Geography

 

Will Pooley, History

Will Pooley is a historian of France from the 18th to the 20th centuries, with interests in popular culture, folklore, and the history of the body. His current project is a history of witchcraft in France from 1790-1940. He is particularly interested in sensations that interact with the supernatural: what did it feel like to feel bewitched? How did sufferers articulate illness and misfortune? Rather than treating the supernatural as a set of beliefs, a lot of his current interests are about the supernatural as a set of experiences, often fragmentary, confused, emotional, and confusing. He also has published and forthcoming work on practices of Tarot and cartomancy, and a longstanding interest in creative methods of historical research and presentation, including poetry, theatre, and creative writing.

 

Rosalind Powell, English

 

Danny Riley, English

 

Nicholas Roberts, Biological Sciences

 

Annie Strausa, English

 

Hazel Streeter, English

 

Lisa May Thomas, Policy Studies

Dr Lisa May Thomas is a dance artist and researcher. She investigates the intersections between dance, embodied participation, and immersive technology, and her film and performance work has been experienced by audiences around the world. Lisa is a resident at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol and Studio Wayne McGregor QuestLab Network Artist. Her recent works include social VR experience Soma (Bloomsbury Theatre 2021) and participatory audio experience Unlocking Touch in collaboration with UCL’s Digital InTouch Lab (2022). She is currently working at the new ESRC funded Centre for Sociodigital Futures at the University of Bristol, exploring how the futures of care are being re-configured through sociodigital arrangements.

 

Beth Williamson, History of Art

Beth Williamson’s current research interests include medieval religious and devotional practice, especially in relation to visual and aural culture. She concentrates particularly on the forms and functions of religious imagery, the relationships between liturgy, devotion, and visual culture, materials and materiality, and on sensory and bodily experience.  She has published on intersections between art and music, including on the visual representation of music, and on the ways in which music and sound interact with visual and material culture. Particular research at the moment focusses on aspects of religious devotion in medieval England in the late medieval period, including the ways in which devotional practice intersects with the concepts of sight and sound. Several of her PhD students have worked across art/architecture and music.

 

Alice Would, History

 

John Wylie, Geography

 

Rebecca Yeo, Sociology, Politics and International Studies