Professor Tracey Loughran

Biography

I was a scholarship girl in an age when there were not many of us. Between the ages of eleven and eighteen I daily crossed between two very different worlds of home and school. The longer this went on, the less I belonged in either place. Education simultaneously alienated and liberated me. I found refuge in the worlds that literature and history opened up. In the pages of history books, I learnt that difference is a source of strength; that knowledge and creativity are the foundations of resilience; and that if you know where you come from, its easier to see all the different places you might go, and all the many ways you might get there. History continues to anchor and to inspire me, and over and again teaches the lesson that its possible to change the world and yourself. I studied History at Queen Mary, University of London, gaining my PhD in 2006. I spent two years at the University of Manchester, first as a University Teaching Associate and then as an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, before taking up a lectureship at Cardiff University in 2008. I joined the University of Essex in 2017. I am a historian of twentieth-century Britain, with particular interests in the interaction of ideas and experiences of body, mind and self. My research centres on how knowledge is constructed, translated and transformed across different disciplines and in different contexts. This thread connects my diverse research projects on 'shell-shock' in First World War Britain, psychoanalysis in the interwar period, and female bodily experiences, psychological subjectivities and familial relationships in postwar Britain. I am also interested in historical theory, the methodological challenges that researching subjectivity poses, and the relationships between academic disciplines. These interests feed into my work as an Editor on the Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method resource, my edited collection A Practical Guide to Studying History: Skills and Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2018), and the collection I co-edited with Dawn Mannay (Cardiff University) on Emotions and the Researcher: Sites, Subjectivities and Relationships(Emerald, 2018). I currently hold a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award in Humanities and Social Sciences for the project Body, Self and Family: Womens Psychological, Emotional and Bodily Health in Britain, c. 1960-1990 (2017-2020). This major project explores how the sweeping social changes of the postwar period affected womens understandings of bodily and emotional wellbeing. It examines womens experiences at different stages of the life cycle, their relationships to different sources of expertise and authority, and how new reproductive and contraceptive technologies affected their lives. It builds on and interacts with previous British Academy-funded projects on the emotional labour of agony aunts in postwar Britain, and on representations of health and illness in popular womens magazines. The aim of all these projects is to create an intersectional history of gender, body and the self from the bottom-up rather than the top-down.

Qualifications

• 2006: PhD in History: 'Shell-Shock in First World War Britain: An Intellectual and Medical History, c. 1860-1920'. Queen Mary, University of London.

• 2002: MA in Intellectual and Cultural History, Queen Mary, University of London.

• 2001: BA (Hons), History, Queen Mary, University of London.

Appointments

University of Essex

• Professor of Modern History, History, University of Essex (1/10/2019 - present)

Other academic

• Professor in History, History, University of Essex (1/10/2019 - present)

• Reader in History, History, University of Essex (17/7/2017 - 30/9/2019)

• Senior Lecturer, History, Cardiff University (1/9/2014 - 16/7/2017)

• Lecturer, History, Cardiff University (1/9/2008 - 31/8/2014)