ProfessorCatherine Cox

Following completion of my PhD in 2004, I was appointed lecturer at the Department of History at the University of Warwick. I started at University College Dublin in 2006 and as Director, UCD Centre for the History of Medicine, School of History.

My most recent book 'Disorder Contained. Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland, 1840 – 1900', is co-authored with H. Marland and was published by Cambridge University Press in March 2022. An Open Access publication, it is the first historical account of the complex relationship between prison discipline and mental breakdown in England and Ireland.

Earlier book publications are Negotiating insanity in the southeast of Ireland, 1820-1900 (Manchester, 2012, 2018); Adolescence in Modern Irish History (Houndmills, 2015) with Susannah Riordan; Migration, Health, and Ethnicity in the Modern World (Houndmills, 2013) with Hilary Marland; and Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History 1750-1970 (Houndmills, 2010) with Maria Luddy. I have published numerous peer-reviewed articles in the main journals in my field, including Social History of Medicine, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Journal of Social History and Social History.

From 2014-2021, I was Principal Investigator on a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award entitled 'Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000' working with Hilary Marland on the strand on mental health in prison, 1850–2000. In 2021 I won UCD Research Competition for a series of public engagement activities associated with the Wellcome Trust Award. The 'Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000' Award built on an earlier collaboration with Professor Marland on a Wellcome Trust supported project on Irish migration and mental illness.

I am President of Economic and Social History Society of Ireland. I served as Secretary of the Royal Irish Academic Historical Studies Committee, and Deputy Chair of Irish Committee of Historical Sciences. I am a member of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.

Current and past PhD Supervisions:
Fiona Slevin: (Urban Development in Post-Famine Ireland', (PhD, 2021-current)
James Grannell: 'Community responses to HIV/AIDS in the Republic of Ireland, 1983-89', (PhD, 2015-current)
Stephen Bance: 'Crippled, maimed, lamed, shattered and broken' polio in Ireland , 1942-1970', (PhD, 2013-17)
David Durnin: 'Medical provision and the Irish experience of the First World War, 1912-25', (PhD, 2011-15)
Alice Mauger: 'The great class which lies between : provision for the non-pauper insane in nineteenth-century Ireland', (PhD, 2010-14)
Anne Mac Lellan:' 'That preventable and curable disease': Dr Dorothy Price and the eradication of tuberculosis in Ireland, 1930-1960', (2007-12)
Fiachra Byrne: 'Madness and mental illness in Ireland : discourses, people and practices, 1900 to c. 1960', (PhD, 2006-11)