Kevin Jones
Teaching Associate, Faculty of Arts
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Biography
I was appointed as a Teaching Associate in September 2024 and I teach Global History and the History of Medicine. I wrote my PhD on the history of the psychiatric classification developed by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and passed my viva with editorial corrections in March 2020. Between then and March 2021, I held a research fellowship at the University of Leeds' Arts and Humanities Research Institute where I further developed my work to address the links between classification and mental health statistics. Subsequently, I joined the University of Birmingham, where I participated in the Everyday Cyborgs 2.0 project to assist in the development of scholarly and public facing work on the history of medical technology. In September that year I was appointed as a research fellow at the National Archives to develop ways of understanding admissions to archives, and this allowed me to pursue my interest in computational approaches to historical methods, which culminated in published work on the history of archive data. In September 2022 I was appointed a Teaching Fellow at the University of Leeds, where I taught the history of science, technology and medicine.
Expertise Summary
My work explores the intersection between technology and medicine, with a particular interest in the ways bureaucratic and communications technologies contribute to the development of scientific knowledge.
My PhD thesis and the subsequent monograph on which it is based, explored the ways that public records and medical bureaucracy contributed to the development of psychiatric classification and health statistics. Using the example of the classification developed by professional medical associates during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It concludes that the history of psychiatric classification cannot be told without the history of mental health statistics, as nosologies during this period were developed to improve the medical data collected during administrative processes. The monograph that explores these intersections was published in Winter 2024 as a part of Palgrave MacMillan's Mental Health in Historical Perspective Series.
I am also interested in the intersections between scientific ideas and communications technologies as well as information technologies.
Teaching Summary
I have experience teaching the history of science, technology and medicine to foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate students. I specialise in teaching of the histories of psychiatry and… read more
Research Summary
I have recently published a monograph based on my doctoral research into the history of psychiatric classification. The work establishes new links between classification, diagnosis and medical… read more
Selected Publications
KEVIN MATTHEW JONES, 2025. Psychological Classification and Diagnosis in Asylum Statistics, 1800 - 1948: The British Table of the Forms of Insanity 1. Palgrave Macmillan. (In Press.)
KEVIN MATTHEW JONES, 2025. Authenticity and Representations of Mental Health in Popular Visual Media: Schizophrenia, Dementia Praecox and Hollywood, 1940 – 1960. In: ANNA SIX, ed., Madness in Literature and Visual Culture: Critical Interventions Bloomsbury. (In Press.)
KEVIN MATTHEW JONES, 2025. Book Review: Susanne Schmidt, Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché The British Journal for the History of Science. 57(213), 1 - 2
I have experience teaching the history of science, technology and medicine to foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate students. I specialise in teaching of the histories of psychiatry and psychology, the history of medicine, and the history of science communication. I am particularly interested in fostering critical debate over the relationships between science, magic and religion and the development of the studies of the mind in the modern period. I am also interested in the ways science has shaped culture and society through the wya it has been represented in visual media.
Current Research
I have recently published a monograph based on my doctoral research into the history of psychiatric classification. The work establishes new links between classification, diagnosis and medical statistics, providing new and fresh insights into the history of mental health statistics.
I am also currently working on a chapter on psychiatric diagnosis as portrayed in Hollywood films of the 1940s through to the 1960s. It will be published in 2025 as a part of an edited collection on critical approaches to mental health in visual cultures.
Past Research
I have published on the history and philosophy of science, specializing on the history of the human sciences and the history of medical services. In 2018 I co-edited a volume on the history and philosophy of science, and in 2021 I published a paper in History and Policy on psychiatric social care.
My PhD thesis looked at discussions on psychiatric classification undertaken by doctors between 1800 and 1950. My research focused on debates carried out during annual meetings of the British Medico-Psychological Assocation and which are held in the archives of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. It concluded that these discussions contained new insights into the development of medical knowledge.
Future Research
My future research will explore in further depth the historical links between mental health diagnosis, classification and statistics within the context of population studies. I am particularly interested in work undertaken by the Galton laboratories around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the connections between rates of tuberculosis and insanity.
I am developing work on the early years of NHS admissions procedures designed to collect data on mental health diagnosis. My work will look at medical projects research projects that took place during the 1940s and 1950s that shaped mental health statistics published in public health reports issued by the UK government.
KEVIN MATTHEW JONES, 2025. Psychological Classification and Diagnosis in Asylum Statistics, 1800 - 1948: The British Table of the Forms of Insanity 1. Palgrave Macmillan. (In Press.)
KEVIN MATTHEW JONES, 2025. Authenticity and Representations of Mental Health in Popular Visual Media: Schizophrenia, Dementia Praecox and Hollywood, 1940 – 1960. In: ANNA SIX, ed., Madness in Literature and Visual Culture: Critical Interventions Bloomsbury. (In Press.)
KEVIN MATTHEW JONES, 2025. Book Review: Susanne Schmidt, Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché The British Journal for the History of Science. 57(213), 1 - 2 KEVIN MATTHEW JONES, 2024. Review: Clare Anderson, Convicts: A Global History. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022. xv + 476, £26.99, paperback, ISBN 978-1-1088-4072-9 Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism.