Biography
My research is located at the intersection of critical, queer/feminist international and political theory, critical disability studies, history, and sociology. My PhD thesis, which I defended in March 2021, traces the history of the trauma diagnosis in modern Germany from 1871 to 1969. I analyse how different diagnostic and treatment approaches functioned to cohere the nation by constructing certain groups of patients as threats and exposing them to violent forms of treatment, heightened precarity, and death. Understanding psychiatric knowledge as a practice which produces its patients as either fully human "Man" or his less-than-human Others, I analyse how psychiatry in Wilhelmine, Weimar, Nazi, and post-WWII West Germany supported, enabled, extended, or resisted biopolitical, and at times genocidal, German political order.
My doctoral research was funded by studentships from the SeNSS ESRC DTP and the Sussex School of Law, Politics and Sociology.
2021 Edward Said Award (ISA Global Development Section)
Role
Doctoral Tutor
Member of the Sussex Centre for Conflict and Security Research (SCSR)
Editor at Sentio Journal: https://sentiojournal.wordpress.com/about/
Qualifications
BA (Hons) History and Sociology, Goldsmiths
MA Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin
Activities
Paper: 'Trauma Diagnostics as Prevention'.
Presented at the EWIS Workshop 2021 (online), June 30 - July 3, 2021
Paper: ‘“[…] to painlessly remove those forms of existence that are nothing but ballast”- Eugenic Psychiatry as Statecraft’.
Presented at the ISA 2021 Annual Convention (online), 6-9 April 2021
Paper: ‘Trauma, Security, ‘Man’ – The Psychiatric Construction of the Sovereign German Nation.’
Presented at the ISA 2021 Annual Convention (online), 6-9 April 2021
Paper: ‘Entanglements of Sovereignty and Psychiatry – Psychiatric Assessments of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Post-WWII Germany’.
Presented at Millennium Conference (online) 22-24 October 2020
Paper: ‘German State(s) and Psychiatry: The Trauma Diagnosis as a Martial Technology of Statecraft’.
Presented at the 13th Pan-European Conference on International Relations (EISA) Sofia University, Bulgaria, 11-14 September 2019
Paper: "Caring for the Human, Crafting the State - the Hysteria Diagnosis in Germany, 1916-1920"
Presented at the NORA Conference, University of Iceland, May 2019
Paper: Feeble-Minded, Perverse, Hysteric: German State(s) and Psychiatry"
Presented at the Doing IPS Seminar Series, King's College London, March 2019
Paper: "Caring for the Human, Crafting the State: An Analysis of the Treatment of ‘Failed Soldiers’ in late Wilhelmine and early Weimar Germany"
Presented at BISA Historical Sociology PhD Workshop, University of Sussex, December 2018
Paper: "Queering Anarchy - Reading Fragmented Bodies and Ludic Time in Hobbesian States of Nature"
Presented at the Cambridge Graduate Political Thought and Intellectual History Conference, May 2016