I am an Early Career Development Fellow in Modern British History and teach on both BA and MA History modules at King's.

I completed my BA (2018), MA (2019) and PhD (2023) at the University of Cambridge. From 2022 to 2025, I was a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College Cambridge, and also taught on MA and MPhil courses at the Faculty of History and Institute for Continuing Education at Cambridge.

My work focuses on the history of mental health, emotions and the body in Britain between 1700 and 1920. My 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. My 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.

My 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, I am 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.

Research interests

• Mental health
• Suicide
• Psychiatry
• Emotions
• The body and sexuality

Teaching

I teach across a range of modules in Modern British History, as well as on methodology and historiography. 

Expertise and public engagement

I am keenly interested in communicating the wider public significance and impact of my work, and have had the privilege on working with The OLLIE Foundation to explore the contemporary applications of historical research into the history of suicide. My research has also been covered in The Times and The Guardian, and discussed on Loose Women.

Bluesky: @ellasbaraini.bsky.social

Selected publications

Ella Sbaraini, ‘Everyday Giving: Food, Emotions and Community in England, 1760-1850’, The English Historical Review (in press, 2025)

Ella Sbaraini and Pedro Falk, 'Communicating Beyond Death: Examining Suicide Letters from England (1757–1849) and Brazil (1920–1929)', Cultural and Social History, 21: 3 (2024), 377-396

Ella Sbaraini, ‘The Materiality of English Suicide Letters, c.1700-c.1850’, The Historical Journal, 65: 3 (2022), 612-639

Ella Sbaraini, ‘The Ageing Body, Memory-Loss and Suicide in Georgian England’, Social History of Medicine, 35: 1 (2022), 170-194

Ella Sbaraini, ‘‘Those that prefer the ripe mellow fruit to any other’: Rethinking Depictions of Middle-aged Women’s Sexuality in England, 1700-1800’, Cultural and Social History, 17: 2 (2020), 165-187