Dr Carmen Mangion

Contact details

Email: c.mangion@bbk.ac.uk
Office: 28 Russell Square, Room B11

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research into the cultural and social history of gender and religion in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland is used to highlight wider themes of social identities; gendered spiritualties; medical provision; social inclusion; civil society; sacred spaces; rhetorics of pain and emotional communities. These themes reflect my broad research interests in philanthropy, poverty, social welfare, medical care, pain, disability and the medical missions.

I am also a Researcher on the Birkbeck Pain Project (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/our-research/birkbeckpainproject).

TEACHING INTERESTS

My teaching interests underpin my research focus. At the undergraduate core course level, I teach Modern British social and cultural history. At the module level, I have taught courses from the industrial revolution to the fin de siècle often with links to London’s history. In 2011-12, I will be responsible for the Study Skills course for first year undergraduates and am contributing to the Bibliography Skills course for Year 3 students. My new Group 3 course Pain, Death and Religion in Modern Britain will explore developments in the social and cultural understandings of pain and death in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. We will examine cultural responses – such as behaviours, beliefs and emotions – to these phenomena and question what they can tell us much about changes to social structures, individual and community identities and family relationships. The course will also address religion, secularisation and the medicalisation of the body as these themes engage with changing ideas of death and pain.

At the postgraduate level, I will be contributing to the MA Historical Research core course as well as teaching the MA option ‘Practical Research Skills for Historians’ in Spring 2012. This course will introduce students to the practical skills and techniques of historical research through three main themes: locating and retrieving historical material; critiquing primary and secondary sources; and examining and organizing historical information. It is open to all MA students (although a core course for those in the MA Historical Research MA). I am also course coordinator for the MA Medicine, Science and Society and will be teaching the option ‘Britain’s Medical Marketplace, 1759-1939’. In this option, students will examine how doctors, nurses and patients encountered illness and addressed medical care in Britain’s medical marketplace. Students will explore competing new and old forms of medical practices, from scientifically-based developments to the most imaginative kinds of quackery! This option will consider the evolving relationship between doctors, nurses and patients through the exploration of gender, class, religion, poverty and professionalisation.

Other courses taught at one time or another

History and Culture of Britain
History of London
The Birth of Modern Britain: Culture, Society and Politics (1780-1914)
From Rags to Riches: Virtue and Vice in Victorian Britain
British History from the middle of the eighteenth-century
Britain’s Industrial Revolution
Cultures of Death and Bereavement in Victorian Britain
Fin de Siècle
Themes in the history and theory of modern science and medicine
Britain's Medical Marketplace (1759-1939)
Medicine and the State (1759-1939)
Study Skills Course
History and Culture
History and Historians
Computing for Historians
Practical Research Skills for Historians

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Contested Identities: Catholic women religious in nineteenth-century England and Wales (Manchester University Press, 2008)

Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Europe, 1200-1900 (edited with Laurence Lux-Sterritt) (Palgrave, 2010)

The French Revolution and the End of Exile, volume 6 of a 6 volume edited collection of primary documents entitled The English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800 (Pickering & Chatto, forthcoming 2013)

‘“Good Teacher” or “Good Religious”?: The Professional Identity of Catholic Women Religious in nineteenth-century England and Wales’, Women’s History Review, 14:2 (2005), pp. 223-242.

‘Laying “Good Strong Foundations”: the power of the symbolic in the formation of a religious sister’, Women’s History Review, 16:3 (2007), pp. 403-15.

‘“To console, to nurse, to prepare for eternity”: The sick-room as a sacred space’, Women’s History Review, (forthcoming 2011).

‘“The business of life”: Educating Catholic deaf children in late nineteenth-century England’, History of Education (forthcoming 2012)

‘“Why, would you have me live upon a gridiron?”: Pain in nineteenth-century English convent narratives’, 19 (forthcoming 2012)

‘Medical Philanthropy and civic culture: Protestants and Catholics united by a “common Christianity”’ in Proceedings - The First Danish History of Nursing Conference edited by Susanne Malchau Dietz (Dansk Sygeplejehistorisk Museum, 2009), pp. 107-22.

‘Religious Ministry and Feminist Practice, 1830-1930’ in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940 edited by Sue Morgan and Jacqueline deVries (Routledge, 2010), pp. 72-93.

‘The “Mixed Life”: Balancing the Active with the Contemplative’ in Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Europe, 1200-1900 edited by Carmen M. Mangion and Laurence Lux-Sterritt (Palgrave, 2010), pp. 165-79.

‘“Give them practical lessons”: Catholic women religious and the transmission of nursing knowledge in late nineteenth-century England’ in The Transmission of Health Practices (c. 1500 to 2000) edited by Martin Dinges and Robert Jütte (Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation, 2011), pp. 89-104.

‘“Meeting a well-known want”: Catholic health care in nineteenth-century Britain’ in Hospitals and Communities, 1100-1960 edited by Christopher Bonfield, Teresa Huguet-Termes and Jonathan Reinarz (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2012).

‘Developing Alliances: Faith, Philanthropy and Fundraising in nineteenth-century England’ in The Economics of Providence: Management, Finances and Patrimony of Religious Orders and Congregations in Europe 1773-1931 edited by Maarten Van Dijck, Jan de Maeyer, Jimmy Koppen and Jeffrey Tyssens (Leuven University Press, forthcoming 2012).

‘Catholic almshouses in nineteenth-century Britain’ in Almshouses: a social and architectural history edited by Nigel Goose and Anne Langley (forthcoming 2012)

BOOK REVIEWS

Mary Sullivan (ed), The Correspondence of Catherine McAuley, 1818-1841 in Irish Academic Studies, 13:4 (2005), pp. 534-6.

Maria Luddy (ed), The Crimean Journals of the Sisters of Mercy 1854-56 in Nursing History Review, 14 (2006), pp. 252-3.

Judith Jennings, Gender, Religion, and Radicalism in the Long Eighteenth Century: The ‘Ingenius Quaker’ and her connections’ in Women’s History Magazine, 57 (2007), pp. 27-8.

Lise Sanders, Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920 in Journal of British Studies, 47:1 (2008), pp. 239-241

Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922-60 in Journal of Contemporary History, 44:2 (2008) pp. 360-2.

Sue Hawkins, Nursing and Women’s Labour in the Nineteenth Century: The quest for Independence in Gender & History, 23:2 (2011) pp 466-468.

Bart Hellinckx, Frank Simon and Marc Depaepe, The Forgotten Contribution of the Teaching Sisters: A Historiographical Essay on the Educational Work of Catholic Women Religious in the 19th and 20th Centuries in History of Education Researcher (forthcoming 2011)

AREAS OF RESEARCH SUPERVISION

I am interested in supervising undergraduate and master’s dissertations on aspects of cultural and social history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland with themes that reflect an interest in gender, religion, philanthropy, poverty, social welfare, medical care, disability, medicine and pain.