Catherine Beck

I am a social historian of medicine and the maritime world in the long eighteenth-century working on seafarers' experiences of disability, including mental difference, disorder and distress. 

In my previous research I have explored how the ocean environment, the space of the ship and global mobility fundamentally shaped the way that 'madness' was both experienced and understood at sea and in maritime communities. My current project as an EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow investigates the impact of digital methods on sensitive or 'hidden' histories. Using early modern maritime impairment and difference as a focal point, I investigate how the way we store, retrieve and analyse early modern historical data in digitised archives and by using digital methods could reinforce or even introduce biases which risk silencing stories of gender, race, disability, and sexuality. see FLOTSAM. Fragmented data, LOst voices and The potential Silences of the digitised Archive: The case of early modern Maritime disability. 

I have previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the Division of Church History, Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen, and as a Pearsall Fellow in Naval and Maritime History at the Insititute of Historical Research, University of London.