About our staff
Dr Kate Davison
BA Hons, MA, PhD
Lecturer in the History of Sexuality
- Email: kate.davison@ed.ac.uk
- William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Teviot Place
Office hours
Affiliated research centres
External appointments
Associate Fellow, SHaME (Sexual Harms & Medical Encounters) at Birkbeck, University of London
Advisory Board, Centre for Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London
Co-editor, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal
Summary of research interests
Places:- Europe
- Medicine, Science & Technology
- Twentieth Century & After
Research interests
Modern European, British and Australian history, global, world and transnational history, history of science, psychiatry, medicine and sexology, gender, sexuality and LGBTIQ* history, history of emotions, museum and memory studies, history and theory of social and political movements
Current research activities
Book: Aversion Therapy: Sex, Psychiatry and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
Research projects
'Aversion Therapy in Twentieth-century Britain' with Sarah Marks (Birkbeck), Hel Spandler (University of Central Lancaster), Kat Hubbard (University of Sussex), Rebecca Wynter (Birmingham University), Mo Moulton (Birmingham University)
'Queere Zeitgeschichten', DFG-funded Research Network, with Martin Lücke (Freie Universität), Andrea Rottmann (Freie Universität), Jennifer Evans (Carleton University), Benno Gammerl (European University Institute Florence), et al.
Knowledge Exchange and Impact
Media
Patrick Kelleher, ‘Charting conversion therapy’s harrowing history – from its barbaric roots to present day cruelty’, Pink News, 1 April 2022. https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/04/01/what-is-conversion-therapy/
‘The Ruins of Science’, Shooting the Past, season 2, episode 1, radio broadcast hosted by Clare Wright, prod. Michelle Rayner, with guests Kate Davison, Fabian LoSchiavo and Dr Sue Wills, ABC Radio National, 22 January 2019, 30 minutes. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/shootingthepast/shooting-the-past-the-ruins-of-science/10665804.
Farz Edraki and Clare Wright, ‘This “penis lie detector” helped doctors conduct gay aversion therapy’, ABC Radio National website, Shooting the Past blog, 31 January 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-01/penis-lie-detector-helped-doctors-conduct-gay-aversion-therapy/10768044.
‘Wie gehen Museen und Archive mit LGBTI um?’, radio interview by Christian Find with Kate Davison and Andreas Pretzel about the ALMS 2019 Queering Memory conference, rbbKultur Radio, Berlin and Brandenburg, Germany, June 28, 2019.
‘“Erinnerungskultur braucht mehr Vielfalt” - Wie wird die Geschichte der Homosexuellen sichtbar? Ein Gespräch mit Historikerin Kate Davison’, interview by Tilmann Warnecke, Tagesspiegel, June 27, 2019.
Undergraduate teaching
HIST 10486 'Sexperts' and Scientific Publics in the Global Twentieth Century (Year 4) Course Organiser
HIST 10426 Historical Skills & Methods I (Year 3) Pathway Organiser 'Histories of Sexualities'
HIST 08043 Themes in Modern European History (Year 2) Team-taught
HIST 08032 The Historian's Toolkit (Year 1) Team-taught
Postgraduate teaching
Introduction to Contemporary History - 'Sexualities' and 'Emotions'
Theories in Economic and Social History - 'Sexuality'
Current Students:
Thomas Crepin, The shifting status of intersex individuals in the doctrine of Christian denominations in the United States since 1990
Currently accepting research student applications : Yes
Areas accepting Research Students in:
Histories of sexuality and gender from the nineteenth century to the present, particularly relating to:
- queer, trans, bisexual, lesbian, gay, nonbinary, intersex, women's and other LGBTQIA+ histories
- histories of sexology and the psy-sciences (incl. psychiatry)
- history of emotions
- public history, memory studies, archives, museums
- post/colonial histories, racism & eugenics
- Central & Eastern Europe (incl. Germany) and the Anglophone world (Australia, North America, British Commonwealth, etc.)
Publications
Journal articles
‘Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual Aversion Therapy in the 1960s’, History of the Human Sciences 34/1 (February 2021), 89-119.
‘Emotions as a Kind of Practice: Six Case Studies Utilizing Monique Scheer’s Practice-Based Approach to Emotions in History’, co-authored with Marja Jalava, Giulia Morosini, Monique Scheer, Kristine Steenbergh, Iris van der Zande & Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, Cultural History 7/2 (2018), 226-38.
‘Agents of Social Change? LGBT Voices in Australian Museums’, La Trobe Journal 87 (2011), 149-63.
Book chapters
‘Queer Space’, in Jenny Wüstenberg and Yifat Gutman (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (London: Taylor & Francis, 2023), 237-242.
'Neil McConaghy’s Penile Plethysmograph’, in Chris Brickell & Judith Collard (eds.), Queer Objects (Manchester University Press, 2019), 286-95.
‘The Sexual (Geo)Politics of Loyalty: Homosexuality and Emotion in Cold War National Security Policy’, in Sean Brady & Mark Seymour (eds.), From Sodomy Laws to Same-Sex Marriage: International Perspectives since 1789 (Bloomsbury, 2019), 123-40.
‘AV-6 Visually Keyed Shocker, c. 1973’, in Christina Linden and Chris E. Vargas (eds.), Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects (forthcoming).
Translations
Bettina Hitzer & Monique Scheer, ‘Unholy Feelings: Questioning Evangelical Emotions in Wilhelmine Germany’, German History, Special Issue: Feeling and Faith: Religious Emotions in German History, 32/3 (2014), 371-92.
Peter Hallama, ‘“Are we afraid of fathers in the delivery room?” Experiments in Obstetrics in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia’, in Christiane Brenner, Michal Pullmann and Anja Tippner (eds.), After Utopia: Czechoslovak Normalization between Experiment and Experience, 1968-1989 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2022), 267-292.
Frank Henschel, ‘Engineering Families for Children: Adoption and the State Child Welfare System in Socialist Czechoslovakia’, in Frank Henschel, Jan Randák, Martina Winkler and Gabriela Dudeková Kováčová (eds.) Variations and Transformations of Childhood in the Bohemian Lands and Slovakia (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2023), 167-200.
Reviews
Dan Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi. Bloomsbury, 2018. In: Slavonic and East European Review (July 2019).
Evan Hazenberg and Miriam Meyerhoff, eds., Representing trans: Linguistic, legal and everyday perspectives. Victoria University Press, 2017. In: The Journal of New Zealand Studies NS27 (Dec. 2018), 179-180.
Douglas M. Charles, Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s ‘Sex Deviates’ Program (University Press of Kansas, 2015). In: H-HistSex (2018).
History, Memory and Social Movements Conference, 19-20 July, Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum. In: Hist-Soz-Kult (2017).
Yorick Smaal, Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). In: Journal of Australian Studies 41/2 (2017
‘Reasserting Historical, Geographical and Political Specificities in Lesbian Historiography’: Francesca Stella, Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) & Rebecca Jennings, Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History (Monash University Publishing, 2015). In: Melbourne Historical Journal, 43/1 (2015), 148-152.
Reports
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Material Survey Project Report, Museum Victoria, Melbourne, 2006.
Blogposts
‘The Philosophers Have Only Interpreted the World…’, New Fascism Syllabus, 13 June 2021.
‘Power Flip: Intimate Archives and the Ethics of History’, Queer History Warwick blog, University of Warwick (UK), 6 May 2020.