Dr Chris Sandal-Wilson (he/him)

I am a Lecturer in Medical History in the Department of Archaeology and History, Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in History, and co-Director of the Centre for Imperial and Global History.

My specialist research expertise lies in the history of psychiatry, though I also teach and research the histories of British colonialism, the modern Middle East, and sexuality. My first book was on the history of colonial psychiatry in Palestine before 1948, and I am currently developing new projects on the history of international humanitarian psychiatry and the politics of psychiatry in times of catastrophe. Alongside my work in the history of psychiatry, I co-lead a National Lottery Heritage Funded project on Section 28 and its afterlives in the South West, which has resulted in the creation of a new local LGBTQ+ oral history archive, and has been nominated for a 2024 Knowledge Exchange Award.

My first book, Mandatory Madness: Colonial Psychiatry and Mental Illness in British Mandate Palestine, was published at the end of 2023 by Cambridge University Press. My book breaks new ground with its retelling of this pivotal period in Palestine's history. It pioneers a new approach through its critical engagement with a rich but overlooked seam of archival material and sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, and provides a novel perspective on how questions around mental illness mattered not simply in clinical spaces but in the courtroom, the prison, the census, and ultimately in the context of crisis and collapse, too. My book was shortlisted and awarded an Honourable Mention by the British Society for the History of Science 2024 Pickstone Prize committee, awarded once every two years for the best book in the history of science, technology, and medicine. The committee praised the book as "a work that shows how the history of science, technology, and medicine can engage with complex topics in a rigorous and nuanced way, and expose the poverty of polarisation by bringing context, people, and lived experience back in the picture".

In addition to my book, my research to date has been published in the Historical Journal, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, Modern Asian Studies, and other journals and edited volumes. My ongoing research in the history of psychiatry has been funded by the Palestine Exploration Fund and the Council for British Research in the Levant, while the project I co-lead on Section 28 has been supported by the AHRC, ESRC, and the National Heritage Lottery Fund.

I was awarded my PhD from the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge in 2019, where I also achieved my BA and MPhil. I joined the University of Exeter in September 2021, having previously been a Lecturer in the History of the Modern Middle East at the University of East Anglia (2019-21) and Birkbeck College, University of London (2018-19). I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Higher Education Association, and in spring 2024 I was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Culture and the Mind at the University of Copenhagen.

I enjoy teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, and in 2022, thanks to nominations from my students, I was delighted to receive a college teaching award in the category of 'Outstanding Teaching'. I would welcome inquiries from prospective postgraduate taught and research students interested in studying at the University of Exeter.