Staff profile

I am reading for a PhD in the History of Science and Medicine at Durham University with focus on Domestic Health, Women and Nationalism in Late-Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Bohemia. My project is a case study of Magdalena Rettigova's (1785-1845) autobiographical memories with focus on the aspects of mental and physical health. More specifically, studying Rettigova's preserved handwritten autobiography in old German Kurrent Script, I am exploring memories of her so far little known and little examined early life. I focus on various events and relationships from Rettigova's childhood, youth and adolescence which she retrospectively believed had a strong impact on her mental and physical wellbeing as well on shaping her own self and personality. Examining what Rettigová’s memories reveal about the ways she negotiated the normative expectations of her time in relation to her mental and physical wellbeing, my project seeks to learn about female agency, extending our understanding of what was it like to grow up as a girl in Bohemia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.As a Leverhulme doctoral scholar I am affiliated with the departments of Philosophy, History, the School of Modern Languages & Cultures and the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture.

Teaching and Learning

Teaching Qualification:

• Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy - Durham Excellence in Learning and Teaching Award (DELTA1)

Teaching Experience:

I have taught broadly on the history and philosophy of science, medicine, and technology, cultural and political history, and history of education in the modern and early modern periods, as a seminar and tutorial group instructor, and a guest lecturer, including the following full-year undergraduate modules:

Department of Philosophy:

• Science, Medicine, and Society (Year 1 UG module)
• Biomedical Ethics: Past and Present (Year 3 UG module)
• History and Philosophy of Psychiatry (Year 3 UG module)
• History, Science, and Medicine (Year 2 UG module)
• History and Theory of Medicine (Year 1 UG module)

Department of History:

• Modern Times: A Cultural History of Europe, c.1860-1960 (Year 1 UG module)
• Connected Histories: Early Modern Europe, c.1450-1750 (Year 1 UG module)
• Mapping Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Year 3 UG module)

School of Education:

• Historical and Philosophical Ideas of Education (Year 1 UG module)

• History of everyday life
• History of women, childhood and youth, family, and relationships
• Experience, agency, emotions, selfhood, nationhood, physical and mental wellbeing in historical ego-documents
• Cultural history of domestic health: women, cookbooks, medicine, and nationalism
• Late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Bohemia and the Habsburg Empire