Staff Profiles

I am a historian working at the intersection of environmental history and the history of science, medicine and technology. My specialism is in Britain and its Empire in the modern period, from roughly 1850 to 1950. My current work focuses on the history of sleep and circadian rhythms in environmental, cultural and scientific perspective. My previous research explored medical and surgical knowledge along the networks of the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I also have a background as a museum curator and I have worked in collections and curatorial roles at the Science Museum, the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) Museum.

I joined the School of History, Archaeology and Classics in 2024. I previously worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen from 2019 - 2024.

Areas of interest

My primary research focus at present is on histories of sleep and circadian rhythms in the nineteenth and twenteith centuries. In particular, I am interested in how everyday rhythms like sleeping, eating, working and exercising were understood to affect health. I examine scientific and medical texts to consider how rhythmicity was perceived to exist at the intersection of body and world.

Supervision

I am happy to consider research proposals from students within environmental history, history of science, history of medicine, and body history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have a particular interest in projects that relate to histories of public health, occupational health, imperial medicine, animal histories, laboratory history, history of food and digestion, history of sleep and sleeplessness, and Polar histories.

Undergraduate teaching includes:

HIS1101 Evidence and Argument

HIS1102 History Lab 1

HIS1104 Public History

HIS2321 Environmental History

HIS3229 Exhausted! A history of sleep (and not sleeping) from 1750 to the present day

Postgraduate teaching includes:

HIS8061 The Practice of History

• Articles

  • Hussey KD. Z-Time: Making and feeling time in the chronobiological laboratory. Time & Society 2024, 33(3), 307-330.
  • Hussey KD. Timeless spaces: Field experiments in the physiological study of circadian rhythms, 1938–1963. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 2023, 45, 17.
  • Rogers HS, Hussey KD, Whiteley L, Bencard A, Gad C, Abrantes E. Curating Complexities in Art, Science, and Medicine: Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) in Public Practice. STS Encounters 2023, 15(2), 2-17.
  • Hussey KD. Rhythmic history: Towards a new research agenda for the history of health and medicine. Endeavour 2022, 46(4), 100846.
  • Hussey KD. ‘The Waste of Daylight’: Rhythmicity, Workers’ Health and Britain’s Edwardian Daylight Saving Time Bills. Social History of Medicine 2022, 35(2), 422-443.
  • Hussey KD, Biggins M. Clinical images, imperial power and Bhau Daji’s secret treatment for leprosy at the Royal College of Physicians Museum. Science Museum Group Journal 2021, 15.
  • Hussey KD. "Visceral Consciousness": The Gut-Brain Axis in Sleep and Sleeplessness in Britain and America, 1850–1914. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2021, 95(3), 350-378.

• Authored Book

  • Hussey KD. Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.

• Editorial

  • Hussey KD, Douglas Jones R. Introduction: Laboratory Times. Time & Society 2024, epub ahead of print.