CHLS Symposium 2018: Meet the speakers

Dr Victoria Bates is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on the social history of medicine in modern British and Anglo-American contexts. Her research interests lie in the interdisciplinary field of 'medical humanities', falling into two broad categories: medico-legal history and the arts in medicine/healthcare. She was selected for the New Generations Programme in Medical Humanities in 2014/15, and runs the Regional Medical Humanities network and newsletter for the South West and Wales.

Dr Michael Brown is Reader in History at the University of Roehampton. His work explores themes in the cultural histories of medicine, surgery and war, largely through the interpretive prisms of identity, gender and the emotions. His research currently focuses on the emotional cultures of surgery in nineteenth-century Britain. In 2015 he received a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award to lead a team investigating the relations between surgery and emotion from 1800 to the present, in a project entitled Surgery & Emotion.

Chair in Law, University of Bristol Professor John Coggon's research focuses on the relationships between politics, morality, and health law and policy. He has written on various controversial questions, including end-of-life law, organ donation, and confidentiality, but his primary areas of interest are in public health ethics and law, and mental capacity law. He is on the British Medical Journal’s ethics committee, and in June 2016 was made an Honorary Member of the UK’s Faculty of Public Health.

Currently Medical Director for the Practitioner Health Programme (PHP), a service which provides mental wellbeing support to healthcare practitioners, Dr Clare Gerada has most recently been appointed as an expert advisor in the General Medical Council (GMC) medical manslaughter review. Previously, she has held a number of national roles, including Senior Policy Advisor, Department of Health Drugs and Alcohol; Director of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Substance Misuse Use Unit; and was Chair of RCGP National Expert Group on Substance Misuse. In 2013, she was named one of Britain’s top 100 most influential women by BBC Radio Four’s Women’s Hour.

Dr Catherine Kelly is Reader in Law at the University of Bristol, where her research focuses on law’s interaction with medicine and the medical profession in both historical and contemporary contexts. In her historical work she examines the ways in which laws relating to the medical sciences were made, applied and changed. Her interest in current medical laws is informed by her experience working at the Australian Medical Association and focuses on professional regulation and the implementation of public health legislation and policy. In both contexts her work encourages reflection about the development of the medical profession and the legal system’s framing and understanding of disease.

Dr Joan Tumblety is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southampton. She is a specialist in modern French history, with a particular interest in the cultural and gender history of early to mid-twentieth century France. Her publications include an exploration of the imagined connection between national decline and male physical failure in the world of French physical culture, 1918-1945, as well as work on the instrumentalization of memory. Between 2006 and 2011 she served as an editor of the inter-disciplinary journal Modern & Contemporary France.