The "Medical Histories” virtual panel will centres the research of Tri-U graduate students doing work in this area.
Panelists
Matt Edwards (Guelph)
Theatre and Therapeutics: Tracing the Pseudoscience of Conversion Therapy in Canada
Matthew is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph. He holds a BHUMS (2019) and MA (2021) in History from Carleton University. Working under Tara Abraham's supervision, Matthew's work focuses on the history of conversion therapy within Canadian medical institutions. By investigating both pedagogy and healthcare, his project seeks to historicize how violent and exclusionary praxes legitimated conversion therapy in professional and public settings during the 20th century.
Sasha Jones (Guelph)
“Haires in decline”: A Brief Introduction of Age-Related Hair Loss in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England
Sasha Jones is a first-year Master's student at the University of Guelph. She specializes in the social, gender, and medical history of early modern Britain. Her thesis explores the sociocultural and sociomedical impact of balding among eighteenth-century British men and works to expand the limited historiography on this topic. Her research will provide new perspectives on well-developed historical subjects such as economics, gender, and class by exploring the common - yet overlooked - natural bodily process of age-related hair loss.
Chair
Dr. Amy Milne-Smith, professor of history at Laurier research areas include:
- Nineteenth-century British and Imperial history
- Victorian military medicine
- Gender and masculinity
- Psychiatry and mental health
- Crime and deviancy
Dr. Milne-Smith recently completed a monograph entitled Out of his Mind: Masculinity and mental illness in Victorian Britain. The main focus of this research is on representations of men’s mental illness in Victorian culture. This project entails a multi-textual approach, including medical registers, fiction, autobiographies and popular media. Ideas about mental illness were as much a creation of popular culture as medical research, and my work explores those connections.