Ella Sbaraini, our Communications Secretary, is a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College in Cambridge. Her current postdoctoral project examines the experiences of international patients in British mental health asylums between 1770 and 1920. It asks (among other things): how were patients born outside Britain treated in asylums? How did non-English speakers navigate living and interacting in these spaces? Bringing together histories of mental health, ‘madness’, the emotions and immigration, it resituates nineteenth- and twentieth-century British asylums as ‘global’ institutions with complex and changing patient populations.

Alongside this, she is currently working on her first book, which explores the experience of suicidality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. This study seeks to be part of a ‘suicide history from below’ which re-centres suicidal people in our historical narratives. More broadly, Ella is interested in histories of mental health, suicide, death, medicine, wellbeing and materiality.

Ella is eager to engage in public history initiatives, and is involved in working with charities to explore the contemporary application of historical research in suicide prevention.

Key Publications

• ‘The Ageing Body, Memory-Loss and Suicide in Georgian England’, Social History of Medicine (2021)
•  ‘‘Those that prefer the ripe mellow fruit to any other’: Rethinking Depictions of Middle-aged Women’s Sexuality in England, 1700-1800’, Cultural and Social History (2020)
• The Materiality of English Suicide Letters, c. 1700 – c. 1850 (2021)
• Communicating Beyond Death: Examining Suicide Letters from England (1757–1849) and Brazil (2023)