Documenting Bodies: Pain Surfaces
The Pain Project

Documenting Bodies: Pain Surfaces is a paper stemming out of my MFA work Documenting Bodies (2010), presented at the symposium Pain as Emotion; Emotion as Pain, Perspectives from Modern History led by Rob Boddice at Birkbeck University of London (2012). The paper was later adapted into a book chapter in the anthology Pain and Emotion in Modern History, edited by Rob Boddice and published by Palgrave Mcmillan (2014). The symposium in 2012 was part of The Birkbeck Pain Project – a study run by Professor Joanna Bourke, Dr Louise Hide, and Carmen Mignon, funded by the Wellcome Trust. The project set out to investigate how people-in-pain between the eighteenth century and the present made sense of their suffering and sought to communicate it to other people.