Dr Esme Cleall

More about Esme

Esme Cleall works on nineteenth and early twenieth-century Britain and its Empire. Her work explores the body as a site of difference, thinking about how ‘race’, ‘gender’ and ‘disability’ were used to mark certain types of body as ‘unlike’.

Her monograph Missionary Discourses of Difference explored issues of family, sickness and violence in India and southern Africa. Her current work is on ‘disability’ in the British Empire, focussing particuarly on how deafness was experienced and understood and on the connections between discourses of ‘race’ and ‘anomaly’.