An aerial view of Singleton Campus and the bay opposite
Professor David Turner

Professor David Turner

Personal Chair, History

Telephone number

+44 (0) 1792 602975

Email address

Welsh language proficiency

Basic Welsh Speaker
Office - 107
First Floor
James Callaghan
Singleton Campus
Available For Postgraduate Supervision

About

I am a social and cultural historian, with expertise in disability, medicine, gender and the body. I am the author of Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment (Routledge, 2012), which won the Disability History Association Outstanding Publication Award for the best book published worldwide in disability history. I was Co-Director of Disability and Industrial Society: a Comparative Cultural History of British Coalfields 1780-1948 (Wellcome Trust, 2011-16), which explored the perception, treatment and experiences of disabled coalminers in South Wales, Scotland and North East England. This research led to my most recent book, Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British coalmining 1780-1880 (co-authored with Daniel Blackie), published by Manchester University Press in 2018. My current research explores the long history of disabled people’s political activism in Britain since the eighteenth century. I am also a member of the Awen Institute, a £3.8 million project funded by the Wales European Funding Office (2019-22), where I lead research on older and disabled people’s access to the arts and heritage.

A key question guiding my research and teaching is what happens to our understanding of the past when we place people normally marginalized from historical narratives at the centre of the story? I am committed to broadening public understanding of marginalized people’s experiences through collaboration with broadcasters, museums and creatives. I was historical adviser on the BBC Radio Four series, Disability: A New History (2013), and led a team that curated From Pithead to Sickbed and Beyond: the Buried History of Disability in Wales before the NHS (National Waterfront Museum, 2015).

Areas Of Expertise

  • Social and cultural history
  • Disability Studies
  • Social history of medicine
  • Industrial Revolution
  • Gender history
  • Public History and Heritage of marginalized groups
  • Ageing

Career Highlights

Research

Credit: Thomas Inglefield, an artist born without limbs. Etching by T. Inglefield, 1787, after C.R. Ryley. Credit: Wellcome CollectionAttribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Award Highlights