Historian, author, museum research leader
Historian and author
My work on the history of trying to conceive emerged from a long-standing interest in histories of the body, but was particularly motivated by my own experience of trying to become a parent, which didn’t feel very modern. I had previously specialised in the history and culture of the late Middle Ages, but curiosity increasingly pulled me out of period boundaries.
Conceiving Histories is part memoir and part history but these are linked. I used historical research to understand my experience. So, the historical parts of the book are not comprehensive or chronological. They don’t tell everyone’s history, just mine. This leaves plenty of space for others to write their versions, using other materials from different places and times, and to present them in their own unique voices.
I am currently working on an AHRC-funded Research Development and Engagement Fellowship: (Mis)Conceptions: A Cultural History of Pregnancy Ambiguity. I am writing new material on conception and pregnancy ambiguity and managing an engagement project on fertility health. You can read more about that project here.
I took my degrees in English and Related Literatures and then Medieval Studies at the University of York and worked for a long time in universities, before ending up as a researcher at the Natural History Museum, London.
I also hold honorary fellowship positions at Birkbeck, University of London, and the University of Reading.
At the museum
At the Natural History Museum in London, I lead the Collections and Culture research theme. My job description is to ‘make advocates for the planet’ by ‘transforming the study of natural history’. I do that by working with all sorts of different researchers interested in different cultural aspects of natural historical research.
The museum really is as weird and wonderful as you’d think, getting to see inside the drawers and boxes, books and bottles is a huge privilege. Every day brings a new wonder into view.
This is me, gazing into a jar of Xenopus Tropicalis frogs from the Natural History museum’s extensive specimen collections.
In collaboration
For a long time I have worked in collaboration with visual artist, Anna Burel. We met in 2015 when I put out a call through London-based arts charity, the Bow Arts Trust. Conception is a topic bound up with visuality both today and in the past. Being unable to see inside a working body means that people have always needed to make images to understand what is or is not happening. People think in images as well as or as much as words.
Anna has 108 colour illustrations in our book, Conceiving Histories. And we are also now making a set of fertility conversation cards.
Here is a picture of Anna Burel at a festival event presenting a draft of our conversation cards. And another of us both together at an exhibition we held of our collaborative work in 2017.