Recent Talks and Projects
July 2026, UK Society for Anaesthetists, London, UK. Museum of Anaesthesia event. Paper title: Anaesthesia in Nineteenth-Century Art
June 2026, Sorbonne University, Paris. Alcohol and Drugs History Society (ADHS) conference. Paper title: Advertising Absinthe: French Posters at the Fin-de-Siècle
April 2026, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh. Unbounding A Nation: Perspectives from the East and the West. Roundtable event.
June 2025, University College Dublin, Ireland. Women and Alcohol: Dangerous Pleasures? Paper title: Whose Pleasure? Solo and Sociable Drinking in Fin-de-Siecle French Art.
April 2025, Drinking Studies Network, online. Identities and Diversity Seminar Series. Paper title: Passing Time at the Paris Café: Absinthe and Art in Late Nineteenth-Century France.
January 2025, University of Warwick, UK. Language and History of Medicine collaborative research seminar. Paper title: Morphine, Medicine and Masculinity in French Visual and Material Culture, 1870-1914.
November 2024, University of Warwick, UK. Uppers and Downers workshop. Paper title: Bodies and Meaning: The Poses of Opiate Users in French Art, 1870–1914.
September 2024, Glasgow, UK. Degas Symposium at the Burrell Collection. Paper title: Degas, Absinthe, and the Café.
July 2024, Durham, UK. International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (IN-CSA). Paper title: The Pipe and the Syringe: How Visualisations of Opiate Use Promoted French Nationalism and Colonialism.
July 2024, Stirling, UK. Society for French Studies (SFS) conference. Panel chair for Between Word, Image and Sound: Intermedial Aesthetics in the Art of Les Nabis.
June 2024, Buffalo NY. Alcohol and Drugs History Society (ADHS) conference. Paper title: The Visual and Material Culture of Opiate Paraphernalia in Nineteenth-Century France.
February 2024. Online interview with Points (Alcohol and Drugs History Society). Article title: Talking Points: Hannah Halliwell.
Research
PAST RESEARCH
My doctoral and post-doctoral research explored representations of morphine addicts and morphine addiction in French visual culture.
The research, which appears in my forthcoming monograph, Art, Medicine, and Femininity, examined how and why artists almost always portrayed the morphine addict as female, when statistical studies at the time showed men as the majority of users.
Image: photograph taken at Musée d’histoire de la médecine, Paris
CURRENT AND FUTURE RESEARCH
I am currently researching the representations of opium dreams in 19th-century French visual culture. I am also researching the material culture of drug paraphernalia and the visualisations of absinthe in Impressionism.
I have a continued, broad interest in representations of the female body. My research looks at all kinds of visual media, from caricatures and medical wax models to academic oil paintings and avant-garde prints.
Image: from Paul Regnard, Les Maladies de l'Esprit, 1887. Photo: Wellcome Collections (cc)
Past Lecture Highlights
Panel convenor for Visualising Addiction, with Dr Lucy Weir. Association for Art History annual conference, 2023, UCL.
Sensationalising Addiction: Art and Text at the Fin-de-Siècle. French Nineteenth-Century Art Network, 2022.
'A contagion more formidable than the plague’: Addiction in French Art. Association for Art History annual conference, 2022.
The Hypodermic Syringe, Morphine and Nineteenth-Century France. UK Association for Anaesthetists, Heritage Lates series, 2021.
Dangers, Desires and Disease: The Morphine Addict in Visual Culture. Research seminar series, 2021, University of Edinburgh.
Images of Morphine Use(rs) in French Visual Culture, 1884-1914. Intoxicating Spaces (HERA project), 2021.
The Significance of the Image: Morphine-mania in French Visual Culture. Alcohol and Drugs History Society (ADHS), bi-annual conference, 2019, University of Shanghai.
The Dangers of Desire in the Belle Époque. Women's Spaces, Pleasure and Desire in the Belle Époque conference, 2019, University of Oxford.
Medicalisation and Popularisation: The Morphine Addict in French Art. Association for the History of Medicine and Science (SAHMS) annual conference, 2019, University of Virginia.