Amy Milne-Smith

I recently completed a monograph entitled Out of his Mind: Masculinity and mental illness in Victorian Britain. The main focus of this research is on representations of men’s mental illness in Victorian culture. This project entails a multi-textual approach, including medical registers, fiction, autobiographies and popular media. Ideas about mental illness were as much a creation of popular culture as medical research, and my work explores those connections.

I previously completed a SSHRC-funded digital humanities project on contrasting views of Jack the Ripper’s London. This heart of the project is titled "Mapping Ripper's Whitechapel," an open-access website tracing popular representations of crime, poverty, and sexuality in the Victorian press from 1885-1895.

I am currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on ideas of men's mental illness in the British military before shell shock. This project focusses on military psychiatry and treatment options at the time.

• SSHRC Insight Grant "Before Shell Shock: Madness and Mental Health in the British ARmy, 1857-1914," (2019-present)
• Laurier Internal Grant "Policing in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper," (2019)
• SSHRC Insight Development Grant "Ripper's Whitechapel: The Digital Humanities and Perceptions of Space in late Victorian England," (2015-2017)
• Faculty of Arts Travel Grant (2015)
• Undergraduate Research Assistantship (2014)
• Laurier Research Seed Grant (2013, 2012)
• Faculty of Arts Merit Award (2012)

I am happy to supervise graduate students in the areas of Victorian gender, culture, war, sexuality and psychiatry in Britain and its empire.

• “Out of Control: Forgotten stories of military officers in Victorian lunatic asylums.” In Hurt Feelings: Emotion, Gender and Military Medicine in Modern Europe. Forthcoming. Manchester University Press.
• “Lunacy, Soldiering, and the Abrogation of Care in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Military History 88, no. 3 (2024): 642-659.
• Out of his Mind: Masculinity and Mental illness in Victorian Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. 
• “Gender and Madness in Victorian Britain.” History Compass Journal 20, No. 11 (2022): 1-10.
• “Policing in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper: Myths, Monsters, and the real limits of the late-Victorian Detective,” in British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1960, ed. Laura Mayhall and Elizabeth Prevost. 27-49 Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.  
• “Work and Madness: Overworked Men and Fears of Degeneration, 1860s–1910s,” Journal of Victorian Culture 24:2 (April 2019): 159-178
• "Shattered Minds: Madmen on the Railways, 1860-1880," Journal of Victorian Culture 21:1 (2016): 21-39.
• "Queensberry’s Misrule: Reputation, Publicity, and the Idea of the Victorian Gentleman,” Canadian Journal of History 48:2 (2013): 277-306.
• London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, New York: 2011.
• “Club Talk: Gossip, Masculinity, and the Importance of Oral Communities in late Nineteenth-Century London,” Gender and History 21:1 (2009): 86-106.
• “A Flight to Domesticity?: Making a Home in the Gentlemen’s Clubs of London, 1880- 1914,” Journal of British Studies 45:4 (2006): 796-818.

Recent courses include:

HI 110 A History of Alcohol
HI 280 A History of Madness 
HI 318 Crime, Sex, and Scandal in Nineteenth-Century Britain
HI 325 Imperial Fantasies: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
HI 326 A History of Conspiracies

Plus upper level and graduate seminars on Victorian deviancy and War trauma