Sarah Jane Bodell is a second-year doctoral student in history at the University of Warwick studying twentieth century medical missions in London. She holds master’s degrees in History of Medicine and Bioethics and Medical Humanities. Her research has ranged from Partition of India to the slums of early twentieth century London. Sarah Jane’s work seeks particularly to interrogate and understand the colonising process of biomedicine through the setting of the medical mission. Further research interests include gender and women in medical missions, medical space and discourses, epistemic knowledge and power, and the relationship between religion and biomedicine.

I am a first year PhD student at the University of Manchester’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. I completed my undergraduate and Master’s degrees in History at the University of Bristol. I am broadly interested in the nationalised healthcare system of the former German Democratic Republic and its response to the growing incidence of chronic diseases. One such disease in particular is diabetes mellitus, which is central to my PhD project. Diabetes is often associated with capitalism, choice and consumption, yet was increasingly important and talked about in this state socialist society. I am curious to know how, with similar rates to its Western neighbour, this disease was handled behind the Iron Curtain, and whether novel ideas were created in diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation which may be usefully employed elsewhere. As a multi-disciplinary project, I am looking to unite the historiographical arguments present within the social history of medicine on diabetes and chronic diseases with the social and cultural examinations of the GDR, especially regarding the complex relationship between East German citizens and the state at large.

Rebecka Klette has recently completed an MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and is currently finalising her phd research proposal to be submitted to Birkbeck in 2016, concerning the reception and incorporation of degeneration theory into Scandinavian racial biology, literature, cultural debate, and satire, 1870-1922.

Yewande Okuleye is completing her PhD in the history of the re-medicalisation of cannabis(1992-2016) at University of Leicester, England. My research investigates the confluence of factors which facilitated the re-medicalisation of cannabis as a medicine despite the political, medical, social, and cultural barriers which limited the scientific research into the medicinal potential of the cannabis plant. My project seeks to examine how different actors negotiated these restrictions. Oral history interviews have been conducted with key actors within the scientific, medical, legal, and lay communities with the view to write a more nuanced history which foregrounds voices from the margins.
I have integrated a public engagement aspect into my PhD which explores the visual and material culture of science and medicine, as entry points to discuss aspects of my research. I volunteered as a STEM Ambassador and I am keen to develop and collaborate on projects which encourage BAME students to engage with science.
Yewande has a degree in Biochemistry and worked as a research scientist at the Body Shop. Yewande was part of the founding team which developed the cosmetic science degree course at the University of the Arts, London where she lectured cosmetic chemistry. Yewande completed a Masters in History of Medicine at UCL Wellcome Centre before she commenced her PhD.

Tom Ritchie is a first year PhD student at the Centre for the History of the Sciences (CHOTS), University of Kent. Tom thesis title is “Meccano; the nuts and bolts of science” and focuses on Meccano as a construction material used to create differential analysers in pre-war Britain, and a tool of nostalgia in post-war Britain, with support from an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scholarship. He holds an MA in History of Science, Medicine, Environment and Technology. As well as this, he teaches the module “An Introduction to the History of Science” at Kent. Tom also has experience of working in student representation, advocacy and campaigning in his role as Student Union President from 2011-2013, which has informed his interest in Widening Participation initiatives within Higher Education.

Further research interests include how children learn through play, the history of computing and maths and changing learning pedagogies in primary, secondary and tertiary education.

Emma Swain is in her second year of doctoral studies at Queen’s University, Belfast.
She examines Christian conceptualisations of human-animal relations in the late-Victorian religious periodical press. This includes studying the religious engagements with scientific/intellectual developments such as evolutionary theory, as well as debates about the incorporation of non-human animals within a moral sphere and a discourse of ‘rights’ such as in the vivisection debates, and debates concerning human exceptionalism and animal ethics.

Thomas Erslev is pursuing a doctoral degree at Aarhus University. His project, “The Brain as Object – An Intellectual History of the Scientific, Cultural and Ethical Meanings of the changing Ontological Status of the Brain”, studies the neurosciences in Denmark in the last half of the twentieth century through the case of a Danish brain collection. The collection finds itself at the intersection of science, policy, ethics, public opinion and economy and functions as a prism for a broader structural analysis of the role(s) of the brain in many spheres in the period. Thomas holds a BA in intellectual history from Aarhus University and an MSc in HSTM from the University of Manchester.

I am a third-year PhD student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon and I work on the broad subject of natural history (zoological) collections and museums in the 19th century. I am interested in the practices of collecting and exhibiting, and the cultural, symbolic and political meanings of the knowledge produced and negotiated from such collections and in such institutions.
Specifically, my thesis focuses on the zoological collections that were gathered in Lisbon in the second half of the 19th century and that were collected in, what were at the time, the Portuguese territories in Africa. By focusing on the construction of biogeographic knowledge and the contemporary maintenance of the Portuguese empire, my thesis aims to problematize the relationship between taxonomy and imperial discourse, practices, and policies.

Didi is a second-year PhD student at Leiden University. She holds an MSc from Utrecht University and a degree in history from the same institution. Her research is concerned with knowledge of the world underwater (be it oceans, seas, rivers or streams) in Europe during the long-eighteenth century. The primary focus is the development of ichthyology, a branch of zoology that studies sea creatures, particularly fish. She is especially interested in visual cultures of natural history, connections between art and science, and the history of knowledge cultures and practices more generally.

Jason Grier is a PhD student at York University, Canada who studies the history of science and imperialism in the eighteenth-century greater Great Britain. Jason received a BA and MA in history from the University of Saskatchewan, writing a thesis on Isaac Newton’s optical controversies with Robert Hooke, before moving to Toronto to complete his PhD. His dissertation looks at navigational and bureaucratic practices in the early eighteenth century in order to better understand problems of long-distance control and the relationship between science and imperialism.