Email: simeon.koole@bristol.ac.uk

Office: 1.H026, School of Humanities Building

I am a historian of modern Britain and its global entanglements over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am particularly interested in the history of bodies and the environment, and engage with sensory, queer, and science and technology studies, environmental, urban, and global history.

My research tends to connect histories of everyday embodied experience with broader conceptual and, more recently, global environmental changes. My first book, Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age (University of Chicago Press, 2024), examines how the understanding, experience, and practice of touch changed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. Following ordinary encounters in spaces such as tube cars and teashops, the book shows how, over a century, touch shaped what it was possible to know and feel, and how selfhood was understood. Tracing this history reveals broader conceptual histories of disability, vulnerability, and embodied knowledge shaping ethical debates today. In a similar vein, I have also explored how historical queer desire, like touch, shaped thinking about selfhood in and beyond science (Journal of Modern History). For a taster of this work, check out my interview on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed. Intimate Subjects was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society First Book Prize and European Studies Book Award.

My current research goes global, examining how bodies in Britain were transformed by changes in ecologies around the world. My next book project, Within Worlds: A Global History of Modern British Bodies, uses London's docklands as a prism for telling this story. Here, docklanders' bones, stomachs, brains, and other capacities changed in response to the remaking of grasslands, forests, and plantations from Argentina to Malaysia, anticipating wider bodily and affective changes across and beyond Britain. Ultimately, the book will tell the story of connected health and ecological crises today, including current anxieties over neuroplasticity and our 'kinship' with chemicals, monoculture agriculture and soil depletion. I have explored this topic in an article co-written with Ben Mechen and published in Past & Present.

I often collaborate, across disciplines and beyond academia. I was Principal Investigator for an AHRC Research, Development, and Engagement grant (2022-2024), during which I worked with filmmaker George Clark to produce a creative nonfiction film exploring past and present precariousness in London's docklands. Sunless Haven (2024) premiered at Open City Documentary Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and screened at the 7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival and the 38th European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück, where it jointly won the EMAF Award (International Selection). The project was also partnered with architect studio Witherford Watson Mann.

Between July 2026 and January 2027, I am a JSPS Invitational Fellow at the University of Tokyo, where I am collaborating with Harumi Goto and Takashi Ito to develop new histories of the senses and emotions in modern Britain.

Biography

I completed my BA at the University of Oxford, MPhil at the University of Cambridge, and DPhil back at Oxford in 2017, the same year in which I became a Lecturer in Liberal Arts and History at the University of Bristol.

I have been a William Alexander Fleet Fellow at Princeton University (2013-14), Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University (2019), and Remarque Institute Fellow at New York University (2023).

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Research Supervision

I am glad to supervise PhDs on any topic within the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and its global connections, especially in relation to my research: senses; gender and sexuality; history of science; urban history; global history; photography; disability. Please do get in touch if you would like to discuss a project.

Teaching

I teach in both the History Department and Liberal Arts, an interdisciplinary programme which ranges across the arts and humanities. While at Bristol I have convened the following courses:

• Global Histories: Possible Pasts, Alternative Futures (first-year Liberal Arts)
• History of the Present (first-year Liberal Arts)
• Brief Encounters: Love, Labour, and Loneliness in Modern London (second-year History)
• Disease, Deviance, and Disability (second-year History)
• Dissertation (third- and fourth-year Liberal Arts)

I have also contributed lectures and seminars to the following courses:

• Urban Worlds: From Ancient Baghdad to Las Vegas (first-year History)
• Rethinking History (second-year History)
• Progress or Peril? The History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (second-year History)
• Experiencing the Aesthetic (second-year Liberal Arts)
• Millennial Britain (third-year History)
• Dissertation (third-year History)
• Approaches to History (MA History)