Dr Ella Sbaraini

Dr Sbaraini's current postdoctoral project examines the experiences of international patients in British mental health asylums between 1770 and 1920. It asks (among other things): How were patients born outside Britain treated in asylums? And how did non-English speakers navigate living and interacting in these spaces? Bringing together histories of mental health, 'madness', the emotions, immigration and race, it resituates 19th- and 20th-century British asylums as 'global' institutions with complex and changing patient populations. Her PhD thesis explored the experience of feeling suicidal in 18th- and 19th-century England. This work, which is currently being re-formed as a monograph, engages with the history of the emotions, and seeks to be part of a 'suicide history from below' that re-centres suicidal people in our historical narratives. More broadly, Dr Sbaraini is interested in histories of mental health, suicide, death, medicine, wellbeing and materiality. She is keenly interested in communicating the wider public significance and impact of her work, and collaborating with suicide prevention charities to explore the contemporary applications of historical research into the history of suicide.