Dr Alexia Moncrieff

Profile

I studied at the University of Adelaide, graduating with a double major in History and International Studies and a Graduate Diploma in Psychology. I then remained at the University of Adelaide for my PhD and, upon graduation in 2017, was awarded a Dean's Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence for my thesis on the Australian Army Medical Corps in the First World War.

I joined the University of Leeds in 2016 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on 'Men, Women and Care', an ERC-funded project in the School of History. I was appointed to a 3-year position as Teaching Fellow in Modern Global History at the beginning of the 2020/21 academic year and I took up my post as Lecturer in Modern Global History in 2022.

Responsibilities

• Study Year Abroad Coordinator
• Final Year Project Lead

Research interests

I am interested in histories of medicine, war, gender and empire in the modern world. My doctoral research examined the ways that imperial, military, medical and gender hierarchies shaped the provision of medical care to sick and wounded Australian soldiers in the First World War. I analysed three types of care (casualty clearance and evacuation, rehabilitation, and the prevention and treatment of venereal disease) to demonstrate how the Australian Army Medical Corps established its expertise, asserted its authority, and gradually extended its control to areas not traditionally within its purview.

My book, Expertise, Authority and Control: The Australian Army Medical Corps in the First World War, was published by Cambridge University Press in February 2020. Emerging from this research, I am working on a project that uses the extensive correspondence between one Australian doctor and his family to analyse his concerns about his ongoing professional development and education, his experiences of both wounding and healing, his changing religious beliefs, and the negotiation of relationships between brothers with divergent experiences of war.

As part of the Men, Women and Care project, I explored the lived experience of post-war disability through an analysis of the Ministry of Pensions personal pension files, held at the National Archives, Kew. These files contain the paperwork generated in the bureaucratic process of applying for war-related disability pensions in Britain after the First World War and they reveal the intimate details of people's lives. My research focused on the 'Overseas' subsection of the archive to analyse the effects of distance and dislocation on the care for British ex-servicemen.

I have presented and I am publishing on cases that include fraud, family breakdown, domestic violence, workplace deaths and concerns about the welfare of children living in colonial contexts. This research forms the foundation of my next research project, which uses war pension case files from different countries to examine the experiences of ex-servicemen with disabilities who migrated within the British Empire.

Qualifications

• PhD
• BA (Hons I)
• GDip Psychology
• BA (History and International Studies)

Professional memberships

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• Fellow of the International Society for First World War Studies
• Australian Historical Association
• Society for the Social History of Medicine
• European Association for the History of Medicine and Health
• Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine

Student education

I deliver a wide range of research-led teaching and supervision at all levels in the School of History. I offer modules on Australian history in its global context and I contribute to team-taught modules on twentieth-century history. I teach a Special Subject on the First World War as a global war and my third-year option, ‘The Body in Australian History, 1788–2007’, brings together histories of medicine, disability, sexuality, race and gender to examine the changing relationship between the state and its citizens.

At postgraduate level, I have contributed to core modules on the MAs in Social and Cultural History and Modern History and have supervised the dissertations of students on the MA in War and Strategy and the MA in Race and Resistance. I enjoy working with students on their research projects and I supervise International History and Politics Long Essays, as well as undergraduate and MA dissertations.

Postgraduate Supervision

I can offer supervision in the following areas:

• medicine and modern warfare
• disability history, esp. war-related disability
• modern medicine and medical caregiving
• medicine, gender and empire
• Australian history
• the First World War
• embodied histories

Current & Recent PGR Students

• Alexandra Churchill, MRes, 2023, co-supervised with Jessica Meyer
• David Cundall, ‘The Leeds Preventorium, 1925–1956’, (MRes, co-supervised with Will Jackson)
• Louise Earnshaw, ‘Gendered Experiences of Violence and Trauma in Austria, 1914-1938’, (PhD in German Studies, co-supervised with Ingrid Sharp)
• Megan Graham, ‘Health Activism and Black Empowerment in Aboriginal Australia, 1971-2005’, (PhD, co-supervised with Shane Doyle and Kate Dossett)
• Alexandre Pijade Chiaramonte, MRes, 2023, co-supervised with Holger Afflerbach
• Bethany Rowley, PhD, 2021, co-supervised with Jessica Meyer
• Henry Theakston, ‘Understandings of the Easter Rising in the Context of the First World War’, (MRes, co-supervised with Alan MacLeod)

Research groups and institutes

• Women, Gender, and Sexuality
• Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums
• Empires and Aftermath
• Health Histories
• War Studies
• Centre for Global Health Histories

Current postgraduate researchers

• Megan Graham
• Yue Cui