Chris Wilson

I'm a historian of the modern Middle East, British imperialism, and psychiatry. My doctoral research, now in preparation for publication under the provisional title "Mandatory Madness: Colonial Psychiatry and Mental Illness in British Mandate Palestine, 1920-1948", reconstructed how the British mandate conceptualised, encountered, and sought to manage mental illness in Palestine, and how in turn Palestinians – Arab and Jewish – negotiated both mental illness and colonialism. My research has been published in journals including the Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, Contemporary Levant, and the Jerusalem Quarterly.

I completed my PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2018, and I joined the University of East Anglia as a lecturer in the School of History in 2019, after a year at Birkbeck, University of London. My research has been funded by the Wolfson Foundation, the Centre for British Research in the Levant, the Palestine Exploration Fund, and the Joint Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge and Harvard. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and enjoy teaching a range of modules on the history of the modern Middle East and global health.