Dr Catriona Ellis

Profile

Catriona specialises in the history of children and childhood in late colonial India and is particularly interested in state and civil society interventions in the lives of children. She is interested in the expansion of welfare policies in the fields of education, juvenile justice and health, and the impact of dyarchy and constitutional change on this process. In addition, she is interested in ways of uncovering the agency and lived experience of children and has worked on autobiographies, court statements and the material culture of play. Catriona graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2017. Since 2018 she has been a Teaching Fellow at the Centre for Social History of Health and Healthcare, University of Strathclyde running courses in health history, history of medicine , history of the British Empire and history of Indian nationalism.

Research

Publications

Catriona Ellis Imagining childhood, improving children: the emergence of an ‘avuncular’ state in late colonial South India (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2022)

Catriona Ellis ‘The trumpet and the drum: music and reclaiming the delinquent child’ in Anandini Dar and Divya Kannan Childhoods and Youth in India: Engagements with Modernity, (New Delhi: Routledge, forthcoming 2022)

Catriona Ellis 'If you cannot feed the Body of a Child you cannot feed the Brain’: Education and Nutrition in late colonial Madras’ Special Issue: Feeding Bodies, Nurturing Identities: The Politics of Diet in late Colonial and early Postcolonial India, South Asia ed Harald Fischer-Tine, Julia Hauser, Ashok Malhorta, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (Jan 2021).

Catriona Ellis ‘History of Colonial Education: Key Reflections’ In: Sarangapani P., Pappu R. (eds) Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia. (Singapore: Springer, 2020)

Catriona Ellis 'Remembering pre-independence childhoods in South India: interrogating autobiographies and identities’ Social History, 44, 2, (May 2019)

Expertise