Dr Katie Joice

I am a historian of childhood in 20th century Britain and America, working at the intersection of the history of the psychological sciences, emotions history, and visual culture. My research focuses on how the emotions of babies and children have been observed, measured and categorised by psychological experts, and on the effects that new models of the child mind have had on public attitudes and private lives. My forthcoming first book explores the untold history of child psychoanalysis and observational filmmaking. I studied for my PhD at Birkbeck College, London, where I was also a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow.

My British Academy postdoctoral project seeks to answer the question: how did the rise of psychological expertise, with its emphasis on emotional health, transform the lives of disabled children in postwar Britain? This study investigates the troubled emotional landscape that emerged from the encounter between disabled children and the doctors, psychologists and social scientists who treated and observed them, in the aftermath of three major medical crises: the blindness epidemic of the late 1950s, the thalidomide scandal of the early 1960s, and the campaign to liberate disabled children from lifelong hospital care during the 1970s. 

'Bulls, Crocodiles and Other Scientific Instruments: Margaret Lowenfeld and the Alternative History of Child Psychotherapy', Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences, (2025). Winner of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize 2024. 

'René Spitz's Empty Frames: Hospitalism, 'Screen-Analysis' and the Birth of Infant Psychiatry', Psychoanalysis and History, 24(1) (2022).

'Narrating the Infant: A New Look at the Films of James and Joyce Robertson', Psychoanalysis and History, 24(2) (2022).

'Using Film Sources in the History of Psychiatry' in the Routledge Guide to Using Historical Sources: The History of Psychiatry, Chris Millard and Jennifer Wallis (eds.) Abingdon; New York: Routledge (2022).

'Mothering in the Frame: Cinematic Microanalysis and the Pathogenic Mother 1945-67', History of the Human Sciences, 34(5) (2021). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0952695120924266