Publications

"A microcosm of every other issue" : how social workers recognized and responded to the needs of HIV-affected families with children in Britain, 1981-1997

Elizabeth Hannah J

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (2026)

https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrag019

'Do not become pregnant' : Negotiating HIV-affected pregnancy and abortion in late-twentieth-century Scotland

Elizabeth Hannah J

Health and History Vol 26, pp. 95-114 (2025)

https://doi.org/10.1353/hah.2024.a952499

“Low Risk Doesn’t Mean No Risk” : The Making of Lesbian Safer-Sex and the Creation of New (S)experts in the Late Twentieth Century

Elizabeth Hannah J

Everyday Welfare in Modern British History Experience, Expertise and Activism (2024) (2024)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64987-5_15

‘The Wild Women of the West (Midlands)’ : how LesBeWell imagined queer women’s health and its obstacles in the 1990s through the pages of Dykenosis

Elizabeth Hannah J

Contemporary British History Vol 37, pp. 309-338 (2023)

https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2023.2211016

Introduction : publics and their health – historical problems and perspectives

Mold Alex, Clark Peder, Elizabeth Hannah J

Publics and their health Historical problems and perspectives (2023) (2023)

https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526156761.00005

Publics and their Health : Historical Problems and Perspectives

Mold Alex, Clark Peder, Elizabeth Hannah J

(2023)

https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526156761

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Research Interests

• The social history of medicine in Britain
• Health activism (especially LGBTQ health activism, activism around AIDS, teenage activism and (mis)information activism)
• History of public health and health education
• History of childhood (especially around health rights, sex eduction and children's media) 
• History of emotions
• History of sexuality
• Regional histories of everyday health
• Age as a category of analysis
• Oral history methods
• Internet history methods

Projects

A Transnational History of HIV/AIDS Denial: Origins, manifestations, and persitence, 1981 to the present

Elizabeth, Hannah (Principal Investigator)

As long as there have been interventions to understand, prevent, and treat HIV and AIDS, there have been those who deny HIV causes AIDS, or that the virus and the syndrome even exist at all. HIV/AIDS denialist beliefs have been linked to numerous preventable HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths, particularly in post-apartheid South Africa. The life and death nature of HIV/AIDS denialism motivated many to silence its ideas and activists without investigating its origins, antecedents or links to wider medical skepticism and patient activism. This project will examine the transnational history of this HIV/AIDS denial and its consequences within the UK and Australia, from its origins to the present. Drawing on a carefully assembled toolkit of historical, literary, and cultural studies methods, it will ask how, when and why people engaged in HIV/AIDS denial to provide new understandings of denialism as medical heterodoxy, and transform concepts of medical resistance by rooting them in historically-mutable identities, affective attachments, cultural systems, and transnational communication technologies. In illuminating the historical roots of denialism, the project will provide the foundations for new approaches to addressing denial, that move beyond shaming to consider the rootedness of subjectivities, technologies, and values motivating denialist activism.

01-Jan-2025 - 31-Jan-2030

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