Dr Meg Roberts

Fennell Career Development Fellow in the History of the Americas

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 3.07
24 Buccleuch Place

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9LN

Availability

  • Available by appointment during Semester One.
    Semester Two drop-in hours tbc.

Biography

Background

I am a postdoctoral historian of eighteenth century caregiving, disability and labour in North America, with particular interest in histories of healthcare and health crises. 

I was born in London and grew up in Oxfordshire. I did my undergraduate degree in History at the University of Sheffield in 2016, followed by an MPhil in American History at the University of Cambridge in 2018. I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge, during which I spent the 2023/24 academic year as a Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Undergraduate teaching

Transatlantic Disability Histories, c. 1700-1990 (HIST10536)

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

No

Current research interests

Broadly, I am interested in histories of health, disability, and labour, in eighteenth/nineteenth-century North America and the British Empire. My book manuscript, based on my PhD project, explores the labour of caregivers during the American Revolutionary War and the role of coerced labour in the functioning of late eighteenth-century American care networks.

Past research interests

My article in the Journal of the Early Republic examines the relationship between disability and manufacturing labour in the Early American Republic, interpreting 'capacity for labour' as a functional metric used to organise manufacturing work prior to the widespread use of 'disability' as an identity category.

Knowledge exchange

I am currently co-curating an exhibit exploring the experience and labours of American Revolutionary War nurses at the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. It will be open January-December 2026, to coincide with the United States’ 250th anniversary celebrations.

I have collaborated with multiple museums on projects working to decolonize and queer their collections, including the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Whipple Museum of the History of Science. I spent three months in Spring 2021 as an AHRC Research Intern at the University of Cambridge Museums, working with the Whipple Museum to research exhibition content on the legacies of the slave trade and empire in science and technology. I have also worked with the University of Cambridge Department of Public Health & Primary Care to produce interdisciplinary research on LGBTQ+ experiences in the health sector.

I co-founded the Cambridge Disability History Reading Group and co-convened the Cambridge Body and Food Histories Group between 2019-2021. I currently sit on the Editorial Board of the Disability History Association's All of Us blog.

Current project grants

• Lillian Sholtis Brunner Fellowship for Historical Research in Nursing, 2024, Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania

Past project grants

• Friends of MCEAS Dissertation Fellowship, 2023-24, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania
• Three-month residential fellowship, 2023-24, George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon
• Gest Fellowship, 2023-24, Quaker & Special Collections, Haverford College
• Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati Fellowship, 2022-23, American Revolution Institute at the Society of the Cincinnati
• William H. Helfand Fellowship in American Medicine, Science, and Society, 2020-21, Historical Society of Pennsylvania & Library Company of Philadelphia
• David Center for the American Revolution Fellowship, 2020-21, American Philosophical Society
• Robert M. & Annetta J. Coffelt and Robert M. Coffelt Jr. Fellowship, 2020-21, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
• Kluge Fellowship, AHRC International Placement Scheme, 2020-2021, John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress

  • ‘“Capacity for Labor”, Work, and Disability in the Early Republic, 1791-1833’, Journal of the Early Republic, Volume 44, Number 2, Summer 2024, pp. 161-188. https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2024.a932145  (Winner of the 2025 Ralph D. Gray Article Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic)  
  • ‘“Useful Members of Society”: Work and Capacity in Deaf and Blind Schools, 1817-1840’, Living with Disabilities in New England, 2021 Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Nicole Belolan and Marla R. Miller, eds. (Deerfield, MA, 2024).

This article was published on