Grace Redhead

Biography

I am a historian of medicine and the modern British welfare state, with particular interests in oral history, chronic illness and health inequality in the National Health Service.
My PhD dissertation explored contact between the UK health service and people living with the genetic illness sickle cell disease (SCD), which primarily affects people of African, south Asian and Mediterranean descent. Drawing on a range of sources, including state and local archives, oral history research, memoirs and art, my dissertation was both a case study in the shifting power of consumer groups within the NHS, and an exploration of the impact of protest, advocacy and Black British political action in reconfiguring notions of citizenship and shaping the priorities of the British state. I have worked with the Sickle Cell Society, the Black Cultural Archives and the Wellcome Trust on a number of public engagement initiatives, including an exhibition on the history of SCD in Britain held at the Black Cultural Archives in 2021.

Research Highlights of Career to date
Grace Redhead, ‘‘A British problem affecting British people’: Sickle cell anaemia, medical activism and race in the National Health Service, 1975-1993’, Twentieth Century British History 32:2 (2021): 189-211.

Grace Redhead, ‘Family, kinship and ‘everyday theorizing’: Black British women in sickle cell anaemia activism, 1960-1985’, in “Everyday Health”, Embodiment, and Selfhood since 1950, ed. Tracey Loughran. Under review with Manchester University Press.

Theo Williams, Saffron East and Grace Redhead, Anti-Racism in Modern Britain: Histories and Trajectories (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2024)

Work I will be doing at the Centre

At the Centre, I am working with Dr Rebecca Lynch to research chronic liver disease and regional health inequality in the NHS, as part of a collaborative project funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). Through oral history interviews, I will explore how histories of people and places have shaped and are shaped by healthcare provision, and how stigma, environment and constructions of the body affect the development of doctor-patient relationships.