Dr Sarah Marks

Overview

Biography

Sarah Marks works across History, Social Sciences and Policy Studies with a focus on ideas, science and medicine in context. She has held over £2.6m in funding for research across Central and Eastern Europe, Britain, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Before joining Birkbeck she held a Research Fellowship at Cambridge and taught at UCL STS and School of Slavonic & East European Studies. She is the Director of Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health and serves as an Academic Governor on the Birkbeck Governing Body.

Sarah is Principal Investigator for the CBT In Context project (UKRI 2019-27), and co-PI on the Connecting 3 Worlds Wellcome Collaborative Award (2021-6). She is Editor of History of the Human Sciences and advisory board member for the Czech Journal of Contemporary History. Her research has been taken up by the WHO, BBC Radio, and The Wellcome.

Administrative responsibilities

• PhD Senior Tutor, School of Historical Studies
• Academic Governor, 2023-26
• Member of Research Committee for School of Historical Studies

Professional memberships

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

• Member of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies

• Member, History of Science Society

• Member, British Society for the History of Science

Research

Research interests

• Interdisciplinary Mental Health Studies
• Central and Eastern Europe 19th C to the Present
• Science and Technology Studies
• History of Science and Medicine 19th C to the present
• Sub-Saharan Africa 20th C to the Present

Research overview

RESEARCH GRANTS (SELECTED) 

UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship 'Cognitive Behavioural Therapies: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives' (2019-27)

Wellcome Collaborative Award 'Connecting Three Worlds: Socialism, Medicine and Global Health after World War II' (2021-26)

Wellcome Trust/SSHM Network Grant 'Histories and Legacies of Aversion Therapy, the Psy-Disciplines & LGBTQ+ Communities in Britain' 2022-24

GCRF 'Oral Histories of Community Mental Health in Ghana' (2019)

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Journal articles

‘From Cochrane to NICE: effectiveness, efficiency and the social-democratic origins of evidence-based medicine in the British NHS, British Journal for the History of Science: Themes, 2026 [accepted in press]

(with Liang Wan & Simon Huxtable) ‘Brief Encounters: Acupuncture, Pavlov, and Scientific Exchange between China and the Soviet Union, 1952-1965’ Isis, 2026 [accepted in press]

(with K. Davison, K. Hubbard, H. Spandler & R. Wynter) 'An Inclusive History of LGBTQ+ Aversion Therapy: Past Harms and Future Address', Review of General Psychology, 2024 

(with S. Chaney & R. Wynter) '"Almost Nothing is Firmly Established": A History of Genetics and Heredity in Mental Health Science' Wellcome Open Research, 2024 

(with D. Pick & M. Hallsworth) 'Hidden Persuaders on Film: Exploring Young People's Lived Experience through Visual Essays', Research for All, 5:2 (2021) 

‘Suggestion, Persuasion and Work: Psychotherapy in Communist Europe’, European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling, 2018

‘The Romani Minority, Coercive Sterilizations, and Languages of Denial in the Czech Lands’, History Workshop Journal,2017

‘From Experimental Psychosis to Resolving Traumatic Pasts: Psychedelic Research in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1954-1974’ Cahiers du monde russe, 2015

Book

Mat Savelli and Sarah Marks (eds) Psychiatry in Communist Europe (Palgrave, 2015).

 

Journal Special Issues

Recovery & Rehabilitation in Mental Health, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 38:5, 2025

‘Psychotherapy in Europe’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 31:4 2018

‘Psychotherapy in Historical Perspective’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 30:2 2017

Post doctoral staff

• Dr David Bannister
• Dr Sarah Howard
• Dr Simon Huxtable
• Dr Becka Hudson
• Dr Rachel Starr

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions external to Birkbeck:

3

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

8

Completed PhD Students

Dr Sasha Bergstrom-Katz ‘On Intelligence Tests: Psychological Objects and their Subjects’ (Birkbeck, 2023)

Dr Hannah Blythe 'The use of interpersonal relationships to treat and understand madness in Britain’s first community-based mental health charities, 1879-1939' (University of Cambridge, 2023)

Dr Becka Hudson 'Pathology and penal risk prediction: investigating the construction of personality disorder and decisions on captivity in British prisons' (Birkbeck, 2023)

Dr Janina Klement 'The Psychiatric Avant Garde: A Transnational Study of Critical Psychiatry’s Reception in Western Europe and the US since 1965' (UCL, 2025)

Dr Evan Sedgwick-Jell 'Depression as a Political Category in English-Language Popular Non-Fiction Writing' (Birkbeck, 2024)

Dr Kiara Wickremasinghe, 'Innovation in Psychiatric Crisis Care: an Investigation into Peer-Supported Open Dialogue in Inner London' (SOAS, 2025) 

Dr Keiran Wilson, '(Anti-)Therapeutic jurisprudence: Queer narratives of power and control under The Mental Health Act' (Birkbeck, 2026)

 

Current PhD Students

Virginia Barry 'The Gods of Small Things: New Technologies and the Re-framing of Women’s Reproductive Choice Environment' (School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck, co-supervised with Robert Topinka)

Juliette Bouillon 'From Disorder to Identity: The Transformation of ADHD in the Age of Neurodiversity' (University of Cambridge, co-supervised with Nick Hopwood)

Mary Heffernan 'Psychoanalysis and Ireland, 1911-1998' (School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck, co-supervised with Sean Brady)

Simon Flynn 'Making Meaning: The Influence of Malthus on the Directions of Darwinism (School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck, co-supervised with Chandak Sengoopta)

Alistair Gaskell 'The Cultural Context of Grief in Britain 1945-2000' (School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck, co-supervised with Carmen Mangion)

Rebecca Klette 'Nordic Decay: The reception and application of degeneration theory and the concept of atavism in Scandinavian psychiatry, criminology, and eugenics, 1880-1922' (School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck, co-supervised with Carmen Mangion)

Eleanor Knuckey 'Psychiatric Chronicity in England, 1954-1999' (School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck, co-supervised with Janet Weston)

Jon Thurston 'The Myth of the Therapeutic' (School of Social Sciences, Birkbeck)

 

Current doctoral researchers

• JON THURSTON

  Nature of supervision:

  PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR, Oct 2023

  Title of thesis:

  The Myth of the Therapeutic: Psychiatry, Heroin & Non-Recovery

• ELEANOR KNUCKEY

  Nature of supervision:

  JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR, Sep 2025

  Title of thesis:

  Psychiatric Chronicity in England, 1954-1999

• MARY HEFFERNAN

  Nature of supervision:

  JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR, Sep 2019

  Title of thesis:

  The Hibernoanalysts: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Ireland 1911-1998

• REBECKA BERNDTSON KLETTE

  Nature of supervision:

  JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR, Jan 2023

• SIMON FLYNN

  Nature of supervision:

  JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR, Sep 2024

  Title of thesis:

  Making Meaning: The Influence of Malthus on the Directions of Darwinism

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• SASHA BERGSTROM-KATZ

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Jul 2020

  Awarded:

  2023

• KEIRAN WILSON

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2023

  Title of thesis:

  Carceral Power in UK Mental Healthcare: A Mad, Queer, Abolitionist Examination of LGBTQ+ Experiences with the Mental Health Act (1983)

  Description:

  This thesis offers a critical criminological interrogation into the carceral logic that organises the UK’s mental healthcare system. Drawing on an interdisciplinary methodological approach, the research adopts a Mad, queer, abolitionist orientation, operationalised through a novel bricolage framework that integrates discursive and phenomenological approaches to knowledge production. The pluralist methodology of bricolage enables a simultaneous focus on the lived experiences of queer people and on the broader discursive conditions that render those experiences intelligible. Queer experiences thus function as a lens through which this thesis attempts to make visible the carceral logics embedded in the UK’s contemporary approach to mental healthcare. Using episodic narrative interviews carried out with queer people who have been detained under the Mental Health Act (1983), this analysis excavates the power dynamics of carceral logic across three interrelated sites: the legal apparatus of the Act, the carceral layers that form within the space of the psychiatric ward, and the production of psy subjects. This thesis demonstrates how gender, sexuality, and madness are (co-) constructed and disciplined through the carceral logic of the mental healthcare system, revealing how deeply connected the concept of care is with coercive and punitive mechanisms. By queering both the methodological and epistemological foundations of psy research, this thesis contributes to a growing body of critical work seeking to unsettle the persistent conflation of care with control and to disrupt modes of knowledge production about queer mental healthcare experiences.

  Awarded:

  2026

• BECKA SEGLOW HUDSON

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Jun 2020

  Title of thesis:

  Pathology and penal risk prediction: investigating the construction of personality disorder and decisions on captivity in British prisons.

  Description:

  This project looks at the construction of the mental disorder, 'personality disorder', widely considered to be the most overrepresented mental disorder in British prisons. The research looks at how this diagnosis is constructed and assessed, particularly through psychometric and risk assessments. It also considers how these tests factor into decision making about people's sentences, management and release. Becka has a background in anthropology and uses ethnographic methods in her research, alongside other tools. The project is historically informed, looking at the development of British prisons and psychometric tools used to assess those held in prison in British history, including in the British Empire. 

  Awarded:

  2024

Teaching

I have taught at all levels at Birkbeck, from Foundation Year through to PhD across the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2026/27 I'll be offering an MA module, 'Mental Health Past and Present', introducing students to the history of psychiatry and psychology, Mad Studies, the rise of lived experience research, policy perspectives and the value of humanities and social sciences approaches to understanding mental health. This module can also be taken as a stand-along short course.

I also collaborate with Sarah Patterson to teach a final-year BA module Mind, Body, Self from Antiquity to the Present with contributions from colleagues in Classics, Philosophy and History; and will convene our BA dissertation training module 'Writing the Past' for students in History, Classics and Archaeology.

Teaching modules

• Writing the Past: Dissertation
• Mind, Body, Self from Antiquity to the Present
• Historical Studies Postgraduate Research Training

Publications

Business and community

I have media training.

Outreach