Dr Emily Bartlett

About

Dr Emily Bartlett completed her PhD in history at the University of Kent in 2018. Since then, she has worked as a Research Assistant on Wellcome Trust funded projects at Kent and Birkbeck, University of London. From September 2020-March 2021, Emily was employed as Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London. In March 2021, she returned to Kent as Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Living Assessments Project.

Research interests

Emily’s research is concerned with the histories of disability and charity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the ways that charitable activities contributed to shifting ideas about disability in this period.

Her most recent work uses anthropological insights into material culture to consider how mundane objects – such as charity flowers sold for fundraising purposes – have shaped popular responses to disabled ex-servicemen and civilians. She has published on the history of disability, charity and employment, and is currently working on a monograph on charitable care for First World War disabled veterans, titled Objects of Pity: Material Culture, Charity, and Disabled Ex-Servicemen, c.1900-1930, which will be published by Manchester University Press in 2023.

Emily has contributed to a number of public engagement projects on the histories of disability and medicine. She co-curated an exhibition on medicine and the First World War at Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery, co-wrote a series of GCSE revision podcasts for Audiopi, and, more recently, contributed to a film by 104 Films about the history of disability and recorded a podcast about her research for The Know Show. She also co-founded the postgraduate, Open Access Journal, Brief Encounters.