Dr Katherine Rawling

Profile

I grew up in North East England and studied History at the University of Edinburgh before completing my Masters in Women’s and Gender History at Royal Holloway, University of London. I then took up a career in marketing working for a large international conference company based in London. I returned to academic study when I received a full doctoral award from the AHRC and was awarded my Ph.D. in History from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2011. I have held teaching positions in Modern British Social and Cultural History and the History of Medicine at the Universities of Warwick, Greenwich and Royal Holloway, University of London. After a career break to have my family I joined Leeds in 2017 as a Wellcome Trust ISSF Fellow in the Medical Humanities. I have lectured in the history of science and medicine in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science and I am currently a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century British History in the School of History and Deputy Director of Research and Innovation.

I've held various leadership roles in the School including:

• Academic Personal Tutoriung (APT) Lead
• Deputy Director of Student Education
• Welcome, Induction and Transition Lead
• Health Histories Research Group Lead

Responsibilities

• Deputy Director of Research and Innovation

Research interests

Research Expertise

My expertise lies in the visual culture of medicine in the modern period. Specifically, I pursue historical enquiry into the role, use, and meaning of photography in medicine and wider society.

I explore the ways in which photography interacted with medical knowledge and practice, particularly when it became part of the patient-doctor encounter in the second half of the nineteenth century. My doctoral thesis (Royal holloway, University of London, 2011) analysed patient photographs contained in British and French medical textbooks, journals and asylum case books to explore photographic representations of patients across a range of nineteenth-century psychiatric institutions. It considered the interactions between gender, class and medical discourses of insanity as they were played out in front of the camera.

Additionally I am interested in the camera in Victorian institutions more generally, and the relationship between power, control, agency, and photographic technologies. My research contributes to the histories of mental health, of photography, and of institutions but, primarily, to the history of patients. It explores patients’ complex interactions with doctors who were also photographers, the ways their bodies and conditions were displayed and appropriated through photography, and the ways in which patient images reflected and were informed by discourses of degeneration, abnormality, otherness and non-medical photographic conventions. This research forms the basis of my first book, Photography in English Asylums, c.1880-1914: The Institutional Eye which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Research interests and projects:

The Ethics of Medical Photography: Past, Present and Future (Co-I, AHRC Research Network 2024-26).

This interdisciplinary workshop brings people together to ask: How can we view and work with historical medical photographs in an ethical way? How can we widen access to early medical photographs while respecting the dignity of both historical subjects and present viewers? For further information see the project link below.

Social Photography Research Group (PI, Emerging Minds UK Special Interest Group, 2021-22).

An interdisciplinary group of historians, psychologists, photographers and young people coming together to facilitate productive cross-disciplinary conversations around social media photography and young people’s mental and physical health. Working on the principle that engagement with historical sources can provide an entry point into difficult topics, we conducted pilot focus groups with 16-18 year-old participants from schools in Yorkshire as the first step in co-producing with young people historically-focussed engagement activities centred around nineteenth-century photographic archives. I also co-ordinated and led a networking event (April 2022) bringing together external colleagues from home and international institutions. 

Thinking Through Things: Object Encounters in the Medical Humanities (Co-I, Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award, 2019-21).

As part of an interdisciplinary team working across the critical medical humanities, I investigated how to how to ‘do’ medical humanities through objects and images. As the sole historian on the project team, I brought disciplinary experience and expertise by providing historical context to objects held in the Wellcome Collection. I co-produced the varied and innovative project outputs by delivering conference panels and papers at the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research Congress (2020, 2021), co-facilitated ECR online and in- person workshops through the autumn of 2021, co-designed the Archival Imaginarium website, and co-created and appeared in a short project film Thinking Through Things (2021). I also designed, made and co-ordinated the material output of the project; an archival box delivered to all final workshop participants containing the items needed to recreate a typical archival encounter (including surgical gloves, ‘archival’ items wrapped in protective tissue and tape). During the online workshop participants unwrapped and engaged with this box as a provocative exercise to help consider the sensory, emotional and intellectual aspects of the archival encounter.

• The Ethics of Medical Photography: Past, Present, and Future

Qualifications

• Ph.D in History (Royal Holloway, U of London 2011)
• MA Women's and Gender History (Royal Holloway, U of London, 2004)
• MA History (Hons) (University of Edinburgh, 2003)

Professional memberships

• Women's History Network
• Society for the Social History of Medicine
• European Association for the History of Medicine and Health
• European Society for the History of Science
• Advance HE (Associate Fellow)

Student education

My teaching covers undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Modern British History, the History of Photography, the History of Medicine, and historical skills. I am also an Academic Personal Tutor for students in the School of History.

I supervise postgraduate students on both our PhD and Masters by Research programmes.

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for History and Philosophy of Science
• Centre for Medical Humanities
• History and Philosophy of Science
• Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums
• Health Histories
• Women, Gender, and Sexuality
• Centre for Global Health Histories

Current postgraduate researchers

• John Lamb
• Isaac Fox