RESEARCH

On the whole, my research in the medical humanities is concerned with the ethics and politics of mental health, which I explore across a variety of interdisciplinary cultural objects, mediums, and texts, including novels, films, case studies, visual cultural, psychological archives, and state policy reports. I am particularly concerned with a few specific intersectional topics in the psychological and psychoanalytic sciences, including: age and queer intergenerational relationality; childhood, class, gender identity, and trans affirmative care; racial justice and protest in the clinic; and patient narrative and testimony. Although my research draws broadly on multidisciplinary methods from literary studies, history, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory, it is committed to a fundamentally humanistic understanding of psychic life, the psychological sciences, and mental health practice.

In my first book, The Political Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the 20th Century (2024), I explore the politicality fostered by psychoanalytic clinic. I argue that clinical psychoanalytic practice constitutes a largely unacknowledged site of political thinking, theorization, and action. While much psychoanalytic scholarship has focused on its intellectual, social, and political impact outside of the clinic, I maintain the importance of understanding the clinic itself as a necessarily politicized space. I make this case by (re)turning to the specifically post-Freudian traditions of psychoanalysis, exploring how prominent 20th century analysts developed unique—and politically salient—clinical practices. Combining case-studies and archival material from Britain and its (post)colonies, I examine across six chapters and five countries how psychoanalysts like Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wulf Sachs, D.W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and John Bowlby forged original clinical techniques for working with their patients that experimentally reimagined the political work that the clinic performs. Rather than apply psychoanalytic theory to political dynamics, then, this book considers how psychoanalysts themselves became formidable political actors precisely through their clinical work, where they implicitly transformed the privatized space of the clinic into a proto-political laboratory for reimagining the formations of race, gender, childhood, nation, and democracy. The Political Clinic thus (re)positions clinical practice as apiece with social and political engagement, challenging established credos of clinical psychoanalysis’s neutrality, apoliticality, and impartiality.

From this first strain of my research, I am also pursuing a public scholarship project that aims to develop a public and accessible multi-genre archive of patient stories, case studies, and testimonies from the clinic. Tentatively titled “The Patient Archive,” this project emerges from the recognition that the majority of accounts available documenting medical encounters are produced by the doctor, psychologist, or psychoanalyst. Wagering that this asymmetry indicates that there is much still left to be said about the medical encounter, this archive aspires to create a space for patients of all types to “speak back” to the psychological and medical complex. In doing so, patients are able to create and record a durable archive of their own experiences on par with those produced and maintained by the medical establishment. This archive is designed to be deliberately broad, encompassing critical and creative patient accounts of many types, including: historical first-person patient stories, newly recovered; outsider writing and accounts from within the psychiatric institution; narratives of encounters with racism, sexism, homophobia, and/or transphobia in psychology or medicine; patient “case-studies” of their own analysis; COVID-19 stories; and illness narratives of any kind. This is an interdisciplinary project combining work from across the humanities and social sciences and will soon be seeking funding.

I am also at work on a second book project—tentatively titled Age Old: Queer Kinship and Intergenerational Sexuality—that develops my intersectional interest in queer sexuality, race, gender, and age. In this book, I argue for a theory of intergenerational relationality and sexuality as a form of queer kinship building. Moving across numerous genres and cultural objects in the long 20th century, Age Old explores the great range of literary and cultural representations of intergenerational relationships and argues that generationally “transgressive” relationality is central to historic and enduring practices of queer eroticism, community, and culture. Drawing on texts and films such as Henry James’ The Pupil (1891), Sigmund Freud’s “Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005), and the popular novelistic and cinematic versions of Notes on a Scandal (2003; 2006), I highlight the central, if under-acknowledged, role that age and generationality have long played in queer eroticism and kinship formation, thereby offering an important new itinerary for both feminist and queer theory.