historical research


My academic research broadly focuses on the themes of urban death, policing, medicine, forensics, crime and photography from the nineteenth-century to the present day.

I’m interested in places and people on the edges of society, in particular those who are marginalised, excluded and forgotten. I investigate the systems and processes and socio-cultural structures that create these edges, and what that looks like in both life and death. I’m interested in chaotic cities, the dark currents that run beneath them, and the networks of institutions that keep them afloat. I’m interested in the early origins of modern medicine and policing, and how discriminatory and exploitative ideologies can become insidiously absorbed into everyday life.

My research has led me to study human zoos, hospitals, hysteria, asylums, prisons, pauper cemeteries, spiritism, post-mortem photography, urban alienation, carceral architecture, death management, morgues, crime scenes, forensics, suicide, illegal cadaver trading, true crime, tabloid culture and much, much more.

I have a PhD in History from King’s College London, where my PhD thesis investigated the morgues of Paris and New York from 1864-1914. Alongside my first non-fiction trade book, I am currently working on projects relating to the history of crime scene photography, an exploration of morgues as a creative muse, and the management of the unknown dead at American pauper cemeteries.

I am available for public talks, lectures and historical consultancy work internationally.

find out more


PODCASTS & BROADCASTING


My research has recently featured on:

BBC Radio 3: Free Thinking

Viking burials, preserving archaeology in Uganda, the morgues of Paris and New York and the medieval attitude to dying are our topics as Chris Harding hears about new research from archaeologists Marianne Hem Eriksen and Pauline Harding, and historians Cat Byers and Harriet Soper.

Listen to Free Thinking: Approaches to Death here.

Criminal Podcast

Have you ever wondered about the real story behind the famous Inconnue de la Seine, the beautiful drowned woman from the Paris morgue who became “most kissed face of all time”?

Listen to Episode 223: The Unknown Woman here.

History Hit’s After Dark Podcast

1. Listen to The Paris Morgue's Dark Story here.

Delving into the history of the Paris morgue, with a story full of poignant humour, Donald Trump, and party hats. 

2. Listen to The New York Morgue’s Terrible Secrets here.

The unclaimed dead of New York City's streets and rivers were once brought to the notorious New York Morgue. It's a history that has never been studied before, full of dark stories and buried secrets.

3. Listen to Cannibalism in Scotland: Legend of Sawney Bean here.

According to legend, Sawney Bean and Agnes "Black" Douglas raised a clan of cannibals in a remote Scottish cave. They killed and ate unlucky travellers on lonely roads. This went on for decades with more than a thousand perishing. Who invented this gruesome story? Why? And why has Sawney Bean become a kind of cult hero in Scotland itself?

5. Listen to The Body in the Trunk here.

It was a murder mystery that gripped 19th century France and changed crime investigation forever. Who was the body in the trunk? What were the groundbreaking techniques used in the forensics investigation? And how did the murder case unfold from there?

4. Listen to New York’s Wildest Murder here.

This 1897 New York murder case that has it all - a villain, an incredibly useless police force, and a duck who saves the day.

PUBLIC TALKS

DEATH AND THE CITY: Crime, corruption and illegal cadaver trading in Gilded Age New York 

6pm on October 16th, 2025

The Old Operating Theatre Museum, London

In the summer of 1866, the first modern morgue in the USA opened at Bellevue Hospital in New York. A direct copy of the infamous Paris morgue – including a public exhibition room for the display of the dead –  it was designed to process and identify the growing number of unknown dead found in the streets and the river of the city every year.  

The founders hoped that this innovative institution would usher in a new era of urban policing, modern death management and medico-legal investigation in a country slowly emerging from the chaos of the American Civil War.  But within a decade, the New York morgue was trapped in a terrible cycle of corruption, crime and neglect. Amidst a flourishing underworld of political meddling, dodgy staff and accusations of unspeakable acts, morgue keeper Albert Napoleon White was later discovered to have been running an illegal cadaver trade through the morgue for over twenty-five years, selling tens of thousands of bodies (and body parts) of vulnerable New Yorkers to doctors, embalmers and medical professionals across the USA.  

Despite a very public scandal, the case was dropped and Albert died a rich man. However, the reputation of the first American morgue as a den of debauchery was sealed. So when the old coroner system was abolished a few years later and replaced with a Chief Medical Examiner system – and a brand-new building – the morgue and all those who passed through it were quickly forgotten, obscuring not only the terrible scandals of the past, but also all the incredible progress in forensics, policing and photography that had been made at the morgue in the last decades of the nineteenth century.  

Stretching from the squalid slums of Five Points and bloody anatomy theatres of Bellevue hospital all the way to the gilded rooms of Tammany Hall, this talk uncovers the dark side of New York during the glittering Gilded Age, the incredible true history of the first morgue in the USA, and the forgotten fate of tens of thousands of New York’s most marginalised citizens. 

tickets available here

previous events:

LONDON: SHOT DEAD: Crime Scene Photography in Art and Culture - 7pm on October 22nd, 2024 at The Century Club, London, UK (get tickets here SOLD OUT)

LONDON: The Paris Morgue: A Dark and Deadly History - 7pm GMT February 5th 2024 for the Last Tuesday Society at the Viktor Wynd Museum (get tickets here SOLD OUT)

NEW YORK / ONLINE: Drop Dead Gorgeous: Fashion, Photography, and the Crime Scene Aesthetic - 6pm EST on Monday May 1st 2023 for Morbid Anatomy (get tickets here)

LONDON: The Paris Morgue: Dark Tourism, True Crime and Morbid Medicine - 7pm GMT March 13th 2023 for the Last Tuesday Society at the Viktor Wynd Museum (get tickets here SOLD OUT)

NEW YORK / ONLINE: The Morgue As A Muse: Art, Aesthetics and the Anonymous Dead - 7pm EST on Monday January 30th 2023 for Morbid Anatomy (get tickets here)

LONDON: The Paris Morgue: Dark Tourism, True Crime and Morbid Medicine - 1.30pm GMT on Sunday October 23rd, 2022 for London Month of the Dead at Brompton Cemetery Chapel (get tickets here)

PARIS: The Paris Morgue as a Muse: Art and Inspiration Among the Anonymous Dead - 10.30am CEST on Saturday October 15th, 2022 for Morbid Anatomy at the Musee Fragonard d’Alfort (get tickets here)

PUBLICATIONS

CONFERENCE PAPERS

2023

BrANCH 2023 at Queen’s College, University of Oxford - September 22-24, 2023:

  • Paper title: ‘From Sinner to Statistic: Investigations into Suicide in Gilded Age New York’

2022

UNC-KCL Transatlantic Conference 2022 at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill - September 19-20, 2022:

  • Paper title: ‘Medicine, Manipulation and the Anonymous Dead: Exploring the uses of the body at the Morgues of Paris and New York’

HOTCUS Annual Conference 2022 at the University of Edinburgh - June 20-22, 2022:

  • Paper title: ‘The invention of immortality: photography at the New York City Morgue’

  • Keynote Panel Presentation: ‘Beyond the Back-Alley Butcher: Constructing Abortion’s Criminality through NYPD Crime Scene Photography, c.1928-1945’

UNC-KCL Transatlantic Conference 2022 at King’s College London - May 11-12, 2022: "

  •  Paper title: ‘Medical Authority and Manipulated Bodies at the Morgues of Paris and New York’

BrANCH 2022: Nineteenth-Century America in Atlantic Context at the Kinder Institute, University of Missouri - April 7-9, 2022:

  • Paper title: Death Across the Pond: Managing the Unclaimed Dead at the Nineteenth-Century Morgues of Paris and New York’

Imagining The Dead: Capturing The Dead in Art and Culture as part of the Grave Matters Online Seminar Series - April 4, 2022:

  • Paper title: ‘Photographing the Dead at the Paris Morgue’

2021

HOTCUS PGR/ECR Conference : Medicine, Disease, and Disability in the Twentieth Century United States (Online) - September 5-6, 2021:

  • ·Paper title: ‘Policing the dead in the modern metropolis: the case of Hart Island, New York.’

AMPS: CITIES IN A CHANGING WORLD: QUESTIONS OF CULTURE, CLIMATE AND DESIGN at City Tech, CUNY, New York / Online- 16-18 June, 2021:

  • Paper title: ‘Managing New York’s Unclaimed Dead, 1868 – Present Day’

Until Death Do Us Part: Historical Perspectives on Death and Those Left Behind, c.1300-c.1900 at Royal Holloway, University of London / Online - 15-16 April, 2021:

  • Paper title: ‘“The gathering place of sin and death”: social order and public perception at the Paris morgue’


ACADEMIC CV


2025 - 2028: Visiting Fellow

Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHoSTM) at Kings College London

2020 - 2024: PhD in History - King’s College London

Thesis - Death as an institution: managing the anonymous dead at the morgues of Paris and New York, c. 1864-1914.

Funded by: The Royal Historical Society | Economic History Society | Scottish International Education Trust | Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) | The Reid Trust | Society for the Study of French History | British Association for American Studies (BAAS) | British Society for Historians of Science | Chalk Valley History Trust | British American Nineteenth-Century Historians (BrANCH) | The Royal Society

Viva: passed with no corrections in March 2025. Examined by Dr John Troyer (University of Bath) and Dr Mara Keira (University of Oxford).

2017 - 2019: MA (Distinction) in Urban History - University of London Institute in Paris

Dissertation - Medicine, morality and the anonymous dead: The Paris Morgue, 1864-1907

Funded by: ULIP Nathan, Quinn & Edmond Scholarship.

2009 -2013: BA (2:1) in History & French - University of Manchester

Dissertation - Visible Evidence of Invisible Phenomena: Photography, Science and Spiritism in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris.