ProfessorCatherine Cox

My earlier research focused on two themes: the history of mental disorder in the nineteenth century, and medical practice and the marketplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In recent years, I have developed new areas of research.

Currently my main research focus is the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award 'Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000'. Again working with Marland, the new project explores the prison as a site of medical intervention. It investigates health risks, medical interventions and health care in English and Irish prisons between 1850 and 2000. Alongside the production of scholarly outputs, and a wide range of public engagement activities, the study will address current policy debates on prison systems, medical ethics and the management of prisoners' health. View our project website at https://histprisonhealth.com/.

It builds on a previous project. In July 2009, jointly with Professor Hilary Marland, University of Warwick, I was awarded a Wellcome Trust Project Grant 'Madness, Migration and the Irish in Lancashire, c.1850-1921'. This study explored the relationship between migration and mental disorder among the Irish in Lancashire asylum and poor law systems, and speaks to contemporary debates on the relationship between mental health, migration and ethnicity; three articles have been published on this work, alongside an edited volume on health, ethnicity and migration (September 2013) and a theatrical production, 'A Malady of Migration', staged in Dublin and Coventry in June and July 2014.