Dr
Chiara Beccalossi

Senior Lecturer

About Chiara Beccalossi

Dr Chiara Beccalossi completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Bologna (Italy). She then undertook a MSc at Imperial College London and UCL before obtaining her PhD through Queen Mary University of London. Before joining the University of Lincoln as a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History in 2015, Chiara held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Queensland (Australia) and lectureships at Birkbeck College, University of London and Oxford Brookes University. In 2013 she was a visiting fellow at Dartmouth College in the US. Chiara is a convener of the History of Sexuality seminar series at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) in London.
Chiara’s research interests include modern European history, in particular Southern European history, modern British history, Latin American history, transnational history, the history of sexuality, the history of medicine and human sciences, gender and queer studies. Her main research to date examines the medicalisation of sexuality in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Chiara’s first book, ‘Female Sexual Inversion: Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, c. 1870–1920’ (2012), explores how same-sex desires came to be considered a medical disorder in Italy and Britain. Combining gender and sexuality studies with medical history, her monograph offers fresh perspectives on how medical practitioners constructed female same-sex desires in Italy and Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Chiara has also co-edited ‘Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789-1914’ (2015) with Valeria P. Babini and Lucy Riall, ‘A Cultural History in the Age of Empire’ (2011) with Ivan Crozier, and has published numerous articles in the field of history of sexuality and medicine.
Chiara has recently won a five year Wellcome Trust University Award to work on a new project entitled ‘Sexology, Hormones and Medical Experiments in the Latin Atlantic World: Local Power and International Networks, 1918-1985’. By focussing on four case studies of medical and eugenics institutes in Italy, Spain, Argentina and Brazil, this new research explores how hormone research changed sexology after WWI. It investigates the exchanges and collaborations between Southern Europe and Latin America. This analysis of the contribution of hormone research to sexual knowledge in Southern Europe and Latin America in the 20th century aims to offer a new approach to the history of sexology.

Department Responsibilities

Chiara is currently carrying out new research for her new project supported by a five year Wellcome Trust grant.

Subject Specialism

Modern European history, modern British history, Latin American history, transnational history, the history of sexuality, the history of medicine and human sciences, gender and queer studies.

Qualifications

PhD
— Queen Mary University of London, 2008

MSc
— Imperial College London, 2004

BA
— University of Bologna, 2001

Awards

Visiting Fellow
— Centre for the Foundations of Science & Department of History, University of Sydney (Australia),