Dr Elsa Richardson
Conference Officer
Elsa Richardson is the Society’s Conference Officer. She is a Senior Lecturer in the history of health and medicine at the University of Strathclyde and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH). Focusing mainly on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain, her research examines where heterodox practices, beliefs and movements met mainstream society and culture, foregrounding questions of knowledge production, scientific authority and non-specialist expertise.
Interested in popular cultures of health and wellbeing she has explored practices in Christianity, neurology, folklore, alternative medicine, spiritualism and literature, most recently dietetics, nutrition and the science of the gut in Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut (Wellcome/Profile Books, 2024) ((https://profilebooks.com/work/rumbles/). Her first monograph Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century: Prophecy, Imagination and Nationhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) (http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137519696) investigated the relationship between science, psychology and the supernatural in Victorian Britain and she has also published on health in the spiritualist movement and the occult origins of psychoanalysis. More recently she has contributed to the Handbook for the History of Epidemiology (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025) and is working on a critical history of the ‘obesity epidemic’.
Elsa has also curated arts and science events for institutions like the Wellcome Collection, has collaborated with artists and filmmakers, and since being named a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2018/19, has developed a profile in broadcast media.