Dr Cathy Smith
Telephone: 01604 892137
Email: cathy.smith@northampton.ac.uk
My BA History degree was completed at Loughborough University in 1988. My PhD on The Renaissance of the English Market Town: A Study of Six Nottinghamshire Market Towns 1680-1840 was awarded from the University of Nottingham in 1996.
Research interests
My current research interests lie in the history of pauper lunacy in nineteenth-century England. The areas I have most recently published on include the politics behind the development of nineteenth-century lunatic asylums, decision-making in asylum admissions, the violently insane and the impact of insanity on family and friends. My current research centres on the medicalisation of poverty in nineteenth-century nosologies of madness; admissions and discharges from the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum; the role of asylums in the nineteenth century, and the impact and cost of insanity in the nineteenth century.
Recent publications
Books
The Renaissance of the Nottinghamshire Market Town (forthcoming, Merton Priory Press, 2007)
Articles and Book Chapters
- ‘Urban Improvement in the Nottinghamshire Market Town 1680-1840’, Midland History, 25 (2000)
- ‘Urban Renaissance and Consumer Revolution in Nottingham 1688-1750’, Urban History, 27, 1 (2000), with J.V. Beckett
- ‘Population growth and economic development in the Nottinghamshire market town’, Local Population Studies, 65 (2001)
- ‘Family, Community and the Victorian Asylum: A Case Study of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum and its Pauper Lunatics’ Journal of the Family and Community, 9, 2 (2006)
- ‘Insanity and the “civilising process”: Violence, the insane and asylums in the nineteenth century’, in K. Watson (ed.) Assaulting the Past: 'Violence and Civilization in Historical Context (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007)
Teaching
At first year undergraduate level I teach Kings and Confessions: Early Modern Europe 1500-1700. My second year teaching focuses on the eighteenth century and I am module leader for a social, political and cultural history module called Power and Protest: British Society 1680-1820. My third year undergraduate modules focus on either Witchcraft and Heresy or British Radicalism 1780-1815. At MA level the modules I offer include: Notions of Queenship in Elizabethan England, and Madness and Mad Doctoring in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
PhD supervision
I currently have postgraduate students working on Medical Relief under the New Poor Law and History in the Eighteenth-Century. For the future I would particularly welcome postgraduate students with an interest in the poor law, poverty and lunacy in eighteenth and nineteenth century England.
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