I am a neuroatypical historian, fiction writer, and mental health advocate originally from the UK, but my work has taken me to Russia, Germany, and Kazakhstan. My academic research focuses on science, medicine, and expertise in the early modern Russian Empire, in particular how those processes intersected with colonialism and globalisation. I explore those topics in my first book Mixing Medicines, forthcoming with McGill-Queens in Fall 2022, which demonstrates how the seventeenth-century Russian court utilised its deep pockets and global connections to bring medical ingredients from across the early modern world to Moscow, only to then edit imported medical practices to suit Muscovite tastes. Alongside my academic work, I also publish fiction and advocacy pieces focused on my experiences of neurodiversity and mental illness. That work has helped shape my second book project, on wounds and global conflict. When early modern Russian soldiers were injured in service to the Tsar they were examined as part of a medico-bureaucratic knowledge-gathering process that was always more about the functioning of the Empire than the suffering of the individual. This project combines early modern medical and military records with scholarship on disability and the history of pain to reconsider how Empires used bodies as a part of their global ambitions.
Learn more about me and my work here: http://www.claregriffin.org/
The College of Arts + Sciences