Dr Catriona Ellis
Teaching Fellow
History
Qualifications
2022 Becoming a Strathclyde Supervisor
2018 PGC Academic Practice, University of Edinburgh
2017 PhD History, University of Edinburgh (part-time)
2008 MSc History, University of Edinburgh (part-time)
2004 BA Hons History, University of Edinburgh
2018 Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
2023 Chair of the Gender, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee (Humanities)
Member of:
Children's History Society
Critical Childhood and Youth Studies Collective, Delhi
BASAS: British Association of South Asian Studies
Publications
Research Interests
I specialise in the history of children and childhood in late colonial India. I am particularly interested in state and civil society interventions in the health and education of children, including medical inspections and the introduction of nutritional supplements and free school meals. I situate this within the wider context of interventions in children's lives, particularly the expansion of welfare policies by the state, by activists and by civil society groups in the fields of education, juvenile justice and the age of consent for marriage. My work considers how this impacted definitions of childhood in South India during the 1920s and 1930s, and the influence of local, regional and global actors such as the League of Nations on the formulation of a rhetoric surrounding the rights of the child. In addition, I'm interested in theoretical and archival ways of uncovering the agency and the lived experience of children and have worked on autobiographies, court statements and the material culture of play. My work also speaks to historians of colonial India interested in the impact of dyarchy, progressive constitutional change and the long term impact of the devolution of further powers to elite Indians in the interwar period in the context of the wider nationalist movement.