I obtained my PhD (in history) from the University of Exeter, as part of Lifestyle, health and disease: changing concepts of balance in modern medicine, a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award led by Mark Jackson. My thesis, Health, Balance, and Women’s ‘Dual Role’ in Britain, 1945-1963, was a feminist genealogy of work-life balance in health and medicine.

I then worked for six years at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, where I collaborated with the sociologist Charlotte Jones on a research strand on loneliness, community, and belonging. This encompassed a co-produced student loneliness project, work with the WHO Regional Office for Europe, and an original play on queer loneliness drawing on our research and written by the playwright Natalie McGrath. During this time, I was a co-investigator on an AHRC urgent grant, Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19, with Luna Dolezal (PI) and Arthur Rose; and a longitudinal project on COVID-19 and family carers led by Siobhan O'Dwyer. I was also part of another AHRC project, The Pandemic and Beyond, which tied together the humanities work on COVID-19 funded by the UKRI. Scenes of Shame and Stigma and The Pandemic and Beyond led to my first and second books, COVID-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK (Bloomsbury, with Dolezal and Rose), and Knowing COVID-19: The Pandemic and Beyond (Manchester University Press, an edited volume with Des Fitzgerald). 

Threaded throughout my work, a concern with the epistemic politics of health and illness has led me to my current research, theorising and historicising loneliness in relation to epistemic injustice. This is the subject of my case study on EPIC (Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare), a Wellcome Discovery Award led by Havi Carel, and taking place across the universities of Bristol, Birmingham, and Nottingham.