Dr Hannah Proctor

Lecturer

History

Contact

Personal statement

I joined the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at Strathclyde in 2019.

I am a historian broadly interested in intersections between left-wing politics and the psy’ disciplines, including histories and theories of radical psychiatry, Communist and anti-Communist theories of the mind, histories of Freudo-Marxism (as both intellectual theory and clinical practice), and emotional histories of the left.

My first monograph Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria's 'Romantic Science' and Soviet Social History was published as part of the Palgrave Macmillan series 'Mental Health in Historical Perspective' in 2020. 

My second book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat was published by Verso in 2024. Structured around eight concepts – melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma and mourning ­– Burnout explores emotional experiences of political defeat, disillusionment and depletion in historical perspective. 

I was awarded an Early Career Research Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust for a postdoctoral project exploring social scientific projects based at institutions in the US that investigated the 'Soviet mind' at the dawn of the Cold War (2019-2022). I have since been awarded a Wellcome Trust University Award to research international campaigns against the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR. I am currently working on an academic monograph (under contract with Oxford University Press), which emerges from these two research projects, titled Communist Cases: Soviet and Chinese Emigres, US Social Science and the Cold War. I am also working on a trade book project on the long 1990s and 'the end of history'.

Before joining Strathclyde in 2019, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin from 2016-2018, taught at Bard College Berlin and Leuphana Universitaet in Germany, and held ISSF Wellcome fellowships in Medical Humanities at Birkbeck and the University of Leeds. Prior starting my Phd, I spent five years working in theatre administration and production in London. 

I've written for both academic and non-academic publications on topics including rayon stockings, gender and the death drive, utopian pedagogy, Communist motherhood, wrinkles, the aesthetics of fMRI, Soviet babies, revolutionary commemoration, British antipsychiatry, depression, perfume, and Ulrike Meinhof’s brain. I have published pieces on film for Another Gaze, Tribune, Jacobin, and Parapraxis and voted in the Sight and Sound Critics Poll in 2022.

I have been part of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective since 2016. I’m also a contributing editor at Parapraxis. 

 

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Professional Activities

45th Conference of the European Society of The History of Human Sciences
Participant
1/7/2026
Political Pathologies
Participant
25/6/2026
The Authoritarian Personality Then and Now
Speaker
18/6/2026
‘Burning out, falling out, breaking down’,
Speaker
11/6/2026
Diagnosing the New Left
Recipient
1/5/2026
‘Political pathologies: psychoanalytic interviewing, the New Left, US Social Science and the Cold War’
Speaker
16/4/2026

More professional activities

Projects

Interdisciplinary Debate at Strathclyde: The Linguistics of Writing, 40 Years On
Roulston, Fearghus (Principal Investigator) Proctor, Hannah (Academic)
We got £1k from the Faculty Strategic Fund to organise a one-day event.
04-Jan-2026 - 04-Jan-2026
‘Migration and Racialisation: The Psyche and the Social’
Proctor, Hannah (Principal Investigator) Singh, Akshi (Principal Investigator)
I was awarded British Academy Early Career Seed Funding with Dr Akshi Singh at the University of Glasgow for a project on the psychological dimensions of race and migration. The award was administered by the University of Glasgow but we were co-PIs on the project. We organized a writing retreat with a group of scholars at Cove Park in May 2023.
01-Jan-2023 - 31-Jan-2023
De-pathologising dissent: international campaigns against psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union and the crisis of the discipline in the West,1953-1991
Proctor, Hannah (Principal Investigator)
03-Jan-2022 - 02-Jan-2027
Cold War Mentalities: Mental Health, Migration, Cultural Exchange and the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System
Smith, Matthew (Co-investigator) Proctor, Hannah (Fellow)
Cold War Mentalities: the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System and Mental Health Encounters Across the Iron Curtain
01-Jan-2019 - 30-Jan-2022

More projects

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Contact

Dr Hannah Proctor
Lecturer
History

Email: hannah.proctor@strath.ac.uk
Tel: Unlisted