Ella Sbaraini

Ella is an Early Career Development Fellow in Modern British History and teaches on both BA and MA History modules at King's.

Ella's work focuses on the history of mental health, emotions and the body in Britain between 1700 and 1920. Her first book, To Quit a Life? A History of Being Suicidal (forthcoming, 2027), seeks to recentre suicidal people within the history of suicide, asking how a focus on lived experience can challenge traditional narratives of change. Ella's other work on suicide has explored varied issues - including emotional expression, materiality and the relationship between suicide and ageing - while aiming to redirect attention onto the perspectives of those who experienced suicidality.

Ella's current project examines the treatment and experiences of international patients in British mental health asylums between 1800 and 1918. It asks (among other things): how were patients born outside Britain treated in asylums? How did non-English speakers navigate living and interacting in these spaces? Bringing together histories of mental health, 'madness', the emotions, immigration and race, it resituates nineteenth- and twentieth-century British asylums as 'global' institutions with complex and changing patient populations.

More broadly, Ella is interested in the cultural and social history of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, and in histories of wellbeing, sexuality, food, migration, letter-writing and the lifecycle.