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
- Imagining Childhood, Improving Children : The Emergence of an ‘Avuncular’ State in Late Colonial South India
- Ellis Catriona
- (2023)
- https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009215213
- [Book review] : Bharat Venkat 'At the Limits of Cure'
- Ellis Catriona
- Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Vol 78, pp. 330-331 (2023)
- https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrad014
- The trumpet and the drum : music and reclaiming the delinquent child
- Ellis Catriona
- Childhood and Youth in India Engagements with Modernity (2023) (2023)
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7
- Book review : Disciplined subjects: schooling in colonial Bengal, by Sutapa Dutta
- Ellis Catriona
- History of Education Vol 51, pp. 759-761 (2021)
- https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760x.2021.1948111
- Educating future citizens : the introduction of compulsory education in the Madras Presidency in the 1920s and 1930s
- Ellis Catriona
- Pariprekshya: A Hindi Journal of NIEPA Vol 28, pp. 49-72 (2021)
- 'If you cannot feed the body of a child you cannot feed the brain' : education and nutrition in late colonial Madras
- Ellis Catriona
- South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Vol 44, pp. 135-151 (2021)
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2021.1862497
Teaching
I currently teach on the following undergraduate courses:
- Disease and Society: An Introduction to the History of Medicine
- British Empire: Commerce, Conquest, Cooperation
- Dangerous Drugs and Magic Bullets: the Social History of Medicines in Modernity
- Living under the Raj: Colonial South Asia
- Imperialism, politics and society Britain 1870-1914
- Global histories of childhood
I also run the MSc module Governing Highs and Health: history and the control of drugs.
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.
Professional Activities
- Mass Education in the Madras Presidency in the 1920s-1930s
- Speaker
- 3/2021
- Foundation Day lecture: Educating future citizens: the introduction of compulsory education in the Madras Presidency in the 1920s and 1930s
- Speaker
- 12/2020
- History & Education: an interface
- Recipient
- 9/2020
- Critical Childhood and Youth Studies Collective (External organisation)
- Advisor
- 2020
- Education and Nutrition: feeding the schoolchild
- Speaker
- 3/2019
- Higher Education Academy (External organisation)
- Advisor
- 2018
Projects
- Supervision of Research Interns @ Strathclyde (RI@S) Summer Internship 2020-2021 - Knowledge Exchange Project Irish Women in the Indian Nationalist Movement
- Ellis, Catriona (Principal Investigator)
- Production of three podcasts (later added to the Decades of Centenaries website) tracing the contribution of 3 Irish women (Sister Nivedita, Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins) to the Indian Nationalist Movement
- 01-Jan-2021 - 01-Jan-2021