I'm an interdisciplinary scholar working between the fields of photographic history, history of medicine and ethics, with extensive teaching and leadership experience in Higher Education in the UK.

My research usually deals with two questions: how people in the past understood something, and how they experienced it.

This is why I love working on photography. Photographs are much more than images: they are material objects that are produced with particular technologies, that are used and re-used in certain ways, and that often become sentimental items. In my research, I explore how practices such as taking, looking at and posing for photographs constructed knowledge and shaped experiences in a variety of contexts.

I have not always been a photographic historian. I did my undergraduate studies in Philosophy at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain), where I familiarised myself with the history of continental philosophy. It was while doing Philosophy that I discovered the History of Science. For my postgraduate degree, I decided to specialise in the History of Science and Medicine. I only started thinking about photography and reading photographic history when I started my PhD. I currently work in a History department, where I teach my specialism as well as general History modules. Going through several fields and academic disciplines has cemented my belief in interdisciplinarity. Disciplines are just tools to understand questions -so my research is guided by questions, problems and concepts that I feel need more inquiry.

I joined the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) at De Montfort University (DMU) in 2014, when I was awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship to work on the project “The Emotional Body. Medical and Theatrical Practices at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century in France”. In 2016, I became a permanent member of staff. Since then, I have secured research funding from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

I have ample experience teaching, designing and convening modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I love teaching outside my specialism while making connections with my research interests. My students often say that my modules were very different from everything else, and enjoyed them for that reason.

I’m currently working on two projects related to the history and ethics of medical photography, but I have also written on the First World War, and photography and emotions. If you are looking for a speaker, writer or PhD supervisor, get in touch!