Dr Helen Esfandiary

Dr Esfandiary received her Doctor of Philosophy in History from King’s College London. She is a cultural and social historian of the body, medicine, and gender - in particular children's bodies. Her PhD thesis ’Maternal Perspectives on Rearing Healthy Children in Elite Georgian Society’ was a reappraisal of domestic child-rearing practices - from birth through adolescence - through the lens of elite Georgian mothers’ ideas about bodies, disease, medicine, and gender in the pre-modern age. 

Dr Esfandiary has taught at King's College London and the University of Roehampton.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• The body, sex, and gender
• Domestic medicine
• Family, parenting, and childhood
• The lifecycle
• Pain and the emotions

Selected publications 

‘‘A thankless enterprise’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's campaign to establish medical unorthodoxy amongst her female network,’ Notes and Records, The Royal Society Journal for the History of Science, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0073

‘‘We could not answer to ourselves not doing it’: Maternal obligations and knowledge of smallpox inoculation in eighteenth‐century elite society.’ Historical Research: The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 92 (2019): 754-770

Teaching

Early Modern World History, History of Medicine, History of Parenting and Childhood.