Our theme for Michaelmas term was ‘Anatomising the Body’. We welcomed Agnes Arnold-Forster and Dániel Margócsy to speak about ‘Unlearning empathy? Surgeons, medical students and anatomical dissection in contemporary Britain’ and ‘Worms of people, worms of ships: natural history, medicine and the Navy in the early modern period’ respectively. Agnes’ paper centred on stereotypes of surgeons and how these shaped surgeons’ attitudes to their medical practice. … Continue reading Anatomising Bodies

Words by Eleanor Barnett and Katrina Moseley In our last term as conveners, it seemed fitting to consider endings; our focus this term was on the embodied processes of ageing and dying throughout history.  A fate that befalls us all, dying has been a universal concern of humanity throughout time and across cultures. How we feel about the process is dependent upon our fundamental beliefs about what happens … Continue reading Dying Bodies: Ageing and Death

Words by Eleanor Barnett and Katrina Moseley This term we focused on the theme of bodily appetite suppression, in particular, those practices of food control that we now variously term ‘fasting’, ‘dieting’ and ‘disordered eating’. Whilst academic work on the subject of eating disorders has multiplied in recent decades, scholars from different intellectual fields rarely talk across disciplinary boundaries. By bringing together academics from theology, psychology, medicine, gender … Continue reading Shrinking Bodies: Fasting and Dieting

*Words by Eleanor Barnett and Katrina Moseley This week we had the great pleasure of delivering a ‘history for schools’ workshop to around forty children between the ages of 7 and 11 (Key Stage 2). Taking the mid 1500s and the mid 1900s as our entrance points into the past, we helped them to discover the degree to which flavours and ingredients have changed over time. The … Continue reading Hungry Historians: A Delicious and Disgusting Journey Through Time

Words by Eleanor Barnett and Katrina Moseley This term we adopted a new approach to ‘bodily boundaries’ by focusing on how and why people throughout history have sought to challenge the physical limits of their bodies through sport. As our reading group made clear, defining sport is not as easy as it initially seems. The planned tactics, mental stamina and athleticism of a football game … Continue reading Extreme Bodies: Sports and Physical Limits

Words by Katrina Moseley (and Eleanor Barnett) Our conference has also been reviewed in The Recipes Project! If you’re interested in how it went, follow this link: https://recipes.hypotheses.org/10820 An array of embodied foodways were brought before us in our end of year interdisciplinary conference, ‘Food and Embodied Identities in the Early Modern and Modern World’. Papers ranged in temporal scope from 1500 to 2000, weaving together … Continue reading ‘Food and Embodied Identities in the Early Modern and Modern World, c. 1500-2000’

Words by Eleanor Barnett Thinking about bodies, it became clear to us that we are not sealed off from the wider world, but are constantly consuming and expelling substances. The list of bodily expulsions is long: excrement, urine, sweat, vomit, ear-wax, hair, sometimes blood or milk, to name a few. Exploring how these expulsions have been historically understood, and how we have subsequently removed them or … Continue reading Meeting Notes: Cleanliness and Bodily Expulsions

Words by Katrina Moseley  Meeting date: 30/01/2018 Our reading group this term focused on our second bodily theme of ‘sex and reproduction’. Readings ranged in historical and geographical focus, from the sexual culture of Renaissance Europe (Judith Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy) — to the medico-cultural world of Victorian Britain (Ornella Mosucci, ‘Clitoridectomy, Circumcision, and the Politics of Sexual … Continue reading Meeting Notes: Sex and Reproduction

Words by Eleanor Barnett In our second meeting on our termly theme of bodily modification, we were really excited to hear two talks that focused on the alteration of skin. First, Dr Gemma Angel (UCL) presented a paper entitled, ‘The history and anthropology of European tattoos: a case study of the dagger-through-the heart tattoo’. Angel discussed the largest surviving European collection of preserved tattoos from … Continue reading Meeting Notes: Tattoos and tanning: the historical study of skin alteration in embodied identities

Words by Katrina Moseley  Meeting date: 17/10/2017 Our first session of term saw us discuss an activity so innate to humanity that we couldn’t help but pore over our own examples of personal and cultural encounters with it. From tattooing to teeth whitening; breast implants to bionic enhancements – not forgetting the array of more ‘mundane’ activities like hair removal; it seems that most of … Continue reading Meeting Notes: Bodily Modification