Professor Sarah Toulalan

My main area of research is in the history of the body, with particular interests in gender, sex, sexuality, ageing, body size, shape and management, health and medicine in early modern England. I have published articles on both fat and thin bodies and reproduction as well as on various issues to do with child rape and sexual abuse.

I am currently finishing writing a book on 'Children and sex in early modern England: knowledge, consent, abuse c.1550-1750' generously funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship; earlier work on this project was funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant. I am aso working on editing two collections of essays, one on early modern bodies and another on beauty.

I am currently supervising doctoral theses on a number of topics including: obese bodies in early modern England; human ingredients in early modern medicine; the body, medicine and sex in early modern India; the material culture of female health and exercise, c.1870-1914; and commodification in eighteenth-century England. I welcome thesis proposals for research projects on a wide variety of topics relating to my research interests.

I was appointed to the post of Lecturer in Medical History at the end of May 2005, having previously worked at Exeter as a temporary lecturer since 2002. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2010.

I gained my Ph.D in 2002 from the University of London (Royal Holloway) with a thesis entitled Writing the erotic: pornography in seventeenth century England published as Imagining Sex: pornography and bodies in seventeenth-century England by Oxford University Press in 2007. I also completed my M.A. at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 1995, having returned to academic study after spending ten years working as a civil servant at H.M. Treasury in London. My undergraduate study was at the University of Southampton.

I am very happy to discuss research proposals on any subject relating to my research expertise and interests. I am especially happy to consider working with candidates with interests in the following areas of early modern history:

• the body, sex and sexuality, including pornography/erotica and prostitution;
• health and medicine including mental health/sickness and venereal disease;
• body size and shape
• gender;
• popular culture;
• clothing or dress (including cross-dressing);
• issues relating to age and ageing as well as children and childhood.

I have also supervised - and continue to do so - theses to do with the above topics for the nineteenth century.

I am currently on research leave holding a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

I am a member of the Social History Society and of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. I am also a trustee of the Reid Trust.