Dr Kate Davison (BA (Hons), MA, PhD)
Lecturer in the History of Sexuality
Address
- Street
-
Room 1M.10, William Robertson Wing, Doorway 4, Old Medical School
- City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9AG
Availability
Drop in times for students in Semester 1, 2023-24 are:
Mondays 11:00-12:00
Wednesdays 10:00-11:00
Undergraduate teaching
Honours
Year 4: HIST10486 ‘Sexperts’ and Scientific Publics in the Global Twentieth Century (Course Organiser)
Year 3: HIST10426 Historical Skills and Methods I Pathway: Histories of Sexualities (Pathway Organiser)
Pre-honours
Year 2: HIST08043 Themes in Modern European History (Team taught)
Year 1: HIST08032 The Historian's Toolkit (Team taught)
Postgraduate teaching
PGHC11334 Historical Research Skills and Sources Pathway: Queer Sources
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Areas of interest for supervision
I invite supervision inquiries about histories of gender and sexuality (queer, trans, nonbinary, women's, LGBT), sexology, emotions and the psy-sciences (incl. psychiatry), in twentieth-century Germany, Central Eastern Europe and the Anglophone world, as well as archives, public history, museums, memory and colonial history in Australia, Oceania and Germany.
Current PhD students supervised
Thomas Crepin, The Intersex Movement and Christian Denominations in the United States since 1990
Research summary
I am a historian of psy-sciences, sexuality, gender, emotions and politics in twentieth-century Central Europe and the British Commonwealth. My research interests span the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries in global, world and transnational perspective, as well as postcolonial, archive, museum and memory studies.
Current research interests
My current research focuses on the psychiatric treatment of queer desire and gender during the Cold War, paying special attention to the transnational circulation of sexological knowledge via behaviourist theories and methods, and the ways that political and social movements have responded to the ‘medical model’. Some of this research will be published in my forthcoming book, Aversion Therapy: Sex, Psychiatry and the Cold War (Cambridge).Past research interests
I have worked extensively in the field of queer archives and public history and memory, and as a translator of scholarly texts from German to English.Knowledge exchange
Journal articles and book chapters
‘Queer Space’, in Jenny Wustenberg and Yifat Gutman (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (London: Taylor & Francis, 2023), 237-242.
'AV-6 Visually Keyed Shocker, c. 1973’, in Christina Linden and Chris E. Vargas (eds.), Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2023).
‘Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual Aversion Therapy in the 1960s’, History of the Human Sciences, 34/1 (February 2021), Special Issue: Histories of Sexology.
‘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.
‘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.
‘Atheism, Secularism and Religious Freedom: Debates within the German Left’ International Socialism Journal 150 (2016).
‘Zur aktuellen Situation von Frauen in Deutschland’, theorie21: Geschlecht, Klasse, Sozialismus – Theorie und Praxis der Frauenbefreiung, 5 (2015), 53-70.
‘Agents of Social Change? LGBT Voices in Australian Museums’, La Trobe Journal 87 (2011), 149-63.
Reports
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Material Survey Project Report, Museum Victoria, Melbourne, 2006.
Published scholarly translations
Frank Henschel, ‘Engineering Families for Children: Adoption and the State Child Welfare System in Socialist Czechoslovakia’, Bohemia: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder ( Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2023)
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)
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.