Dr Alana Harris

Dr Alana Harris is a Reader in Modern British Social, Cultural, and Gender History at King’s College London, having previously acted as the Director of Liberal Arts and taught at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. She has authored eight books, including the pathbreaking Faith in the Family: A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism, 1945-1982 (MUP, 2013) and her most recent monograph The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, 1914-2021 (OUP, 2023). Her research specialisms, advanced in numerous chapters and journal articles, encompass histories of gender and sexuality; ethnicity and migration; devotional cultures; pilgrimage; urban religiosity and material religion.

She is currently working on two projects. The first is a biography of Dr Letitia Fairfield, whose faith, feminism and conviction politics impelled her into fields as diverse as suffrage activism, medico-legal advocacy, war medicine, Irish nationalism, gynaecology and disability policy. The second is an interdisciplinary heritage project, pivoting around lived experiences of mental health and the history of British psychiatry, which is using co-participatory art workshops, nineteenth century photographs and genealogical research to campaign for public memorialisation and restorative justice for the Epsom psychiatric cluster: see outofsight.hortoncemetery.org.