Email: simeon.koole@bristol.ac.uk

Office: 1.H026, School of Humanities Building

X: @SimeonKoole

I specialise in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history with a focus on Britain and its global entanglements. I am particularly interested in the history of the senses and sexuality, and work at the intersection of queer studies, the history of science, phenomenology, global, and urban history.

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 often ordinary encounters between individuals across different spaces, from fog-bound streets to basement teashops, the book shows how changes in touch reshaped broader concepts, such as personal space, disability, and the relationship between the mind and body. Tracing this history, I argue, provides a method for critiquing understandings of embodiment today, particularly vulnerability, capability, and the body as a source of knowledge. For a taster, check out my interview on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed.

My current book project, Within Worlds: London’s Docks and Everyday Worldmaking After the Steamship, zooms in on a neighbourhood to show how worlds are made by how we inhabit them. It examines how, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the bodies and emotions of docklands inhabitants materialised and modified their connections to distant places, shaping their perceptions of trust, risk, and precariousness. In so doing, the book provides an intimate global history, and a history of how intimacy conditions the horizons of our lives. An article on this topic co-written with Ben Mechen is forthcoming with Past & Present.

Within Worlds was funded by an AHRC Research, Development, and Engagement grant (2022-2024), for which I led several collaborations. With Ben Mechen, I collaborated with filmmaker George Clark on a creative nonfiction film exploring past and present precariousness in London's docklands. Sunless Haven (dir. George Clark, 2024) premiered on opening night of 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; you can find William Mann's writings here.

Elsewhere, I have published on photography as an interpretive event in colonial contexts (Comparative Studies in Society and History) and on queerness as a way of thinking in the history of science (forthcoming with The Journal of Modern History).

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)
• Dissertation (third-year History)
• Approaches to History (MA History)