Staff Profile

At first year undergraduate level Dr Smith teaches Kings and Confessions: Early Modern Europe 1500-1700. Her second year teaching focuses on the eighteenth century and she is module leader for a social, political and cultural history module called Power and Protest: British Society 1680-1820. Dr Smith’s third year undergraduate modules focus on either Witchcraft and Heresy or British Radicalism 1780-1815. At MA level the modules she offers include: Notions of Queenship in Elizabethan England, and Madness and Mad Doctoring in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Dr Smith currently has postgraduate students working on Medical Relief under the New Poor Law and History in the Eighteenth-Century. For the future she would particularly welcome postgraduate students with an interest in the poor law, poverty and lunacy in eighteenth and nineteenth century England.

Dr Smith’s current research interests lie in the history of pauper lunacy in nineteenth-century England. The areas she has most recently published on include the politics behind the development of nineteenth-century asylums, decision-making in asylum admissions, and the impact on family and friends. Her current research centres on the medicalisation of poverty in nineteenth-century nosologies of madness; admissions and discharges from the Northampton General Asylum; the role of asylums in the nineteenth century, and the impact and cost of insanity in the nineteenth century.

For publications, projects, datasets, research interests and activities, view Cathy Smith’s research profile on Pure, the University of Northampton’s Research Explorer.