Dr Debbie Harrison

BA (Nottingham), MA (Birkbeck), PhD (Birkbeck)
Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck - Sessional Lecturer

Contact details
email: d.harrison@bbk.ac.uk

About Dr Debbie Harrison

Research

• Contributing editor, medical historian, and director of outreach and publicity, the Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project – a transatlantic collaboration between scholars from Birkbeck, British archival institutions, and US multispectral imaging scientists. In 2010 we commenced the task of deciphering what is thought to be the most significant of Livingstone’s final field diaries, which until now remained unpublished due to its fragile condition and near-illegible script. The project was launched with a ‘lost’ letter and was covered by ITV, BBC Radio 4 and by more than 140 newspapers and academic websites worldwide. See http://www.bbk.ac.uk/news/news-releases/researchers-reveal-dr-livingstones-darkest-hour-through-lost-letters
• Author, A Victorian Hangover: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Addiction. Monograph. Complete manuscript solicited for outside review by Cambridge University Press.
• Co-editor, From Art to Science: A Nineteenth-Century Medical Humanities Reader, an edited collection of primary texts. Work in progress.
• Editor: Demos: A Story of English Socialism, by George Gissing. Forthcoming from Victorian Secrets, February 2011.
• Editor: George Gissing. Workers in the Dawn. Victorian Secrets, January 2010. Reviewed in Times Literary Supplement. 30 July, 2010: 25.
• Author, ‘Rewriting the Addict: Gissing’s Challenge to Fin-de- Siècle Representations of the Female Alcoholic in The Nether World’. In George Gissing and Women. Ed. Christine Huguet. Forthcoming 2011.
• Author, ‘De Quincey’s Confessions and Victorian Narratives of Addiction.’ Chapter in Thomas De Quincey, The English Opium-Eater: Contexts -- Literature, Culture, Society. Ed. Robert M. Maniquis. Forthcoming from CUP, 2011.
• Recent articles:
• ‘All the Lancet’s Men:  Reactionary Gentleman Physicians vs. Radical General Practitioners in the Lancet, 1823-1832.’ Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 5:2 (2009). http://ncgsjournal.com/issue52/harrison.htm. 
• ‘Doctors, Drugs, and Addiction: The Failure of Professional Integrity at the Fin de Siècle.” Gothic Studies 11: 2. (2010): 52-62.
• ‘Exteriors, Interiors and Interiority in Workers in the Dawn.’ Forthcoming. The Gissing Journal, Oct. 2010.

Teaching

• MA option from 2010:  ‘A Victorian Hangover: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Addiction’. Designed for the new MA in Medical Humanities; also open to students on MA Cultural and Critical Studies, MA Medicine, Science and Society, and MA Victorian Studies.
• Planned MA option from 2011: ‘David Livingstone: Faith and Healing in Colonial Africa’. Available to above courses.
• Previous teaching: BA English, and English and Humanities at Birkbeck; BA English and Film at Greenwich.

Biographical details

• In my previous incarnation I was a Senior Visiting Fellow of Cass Business School (City University), and an author and journalist working in the interdisciplinary field of demographics, economics and welfare. In this guise I have written extensively for the Financial Times and also for the Guardian, Telegraph and Times.