Kaitlyn Carter

Kaitlyn Carter is a first year PhD student in the department of History at Queen’s University working under the supervision of Dr. Jenna Healey and Dr. Jane Errington. She holds a Master of Arts from Western University (2021) and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Brock University (2020) where she received the Distinguished Graduating Student award. In 2019 Carter was awarded a Hannah Studentship from the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine/Société Canadienne d’histoire de la médecine and AMS Healthcare to support her Honours Major Research Project at Brock University. This funding allowed her to travel overseas to conduct research at the Wellcome Collection in London and Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh. Her completed MRP, which focused on the wartime artwork of Scottish anatomist Sir Charles Bell, was a finalist for the inaugural Georgina Feldberg Memorial Student Award in the History of Health and Medicine. Carter’s master’s cognate, affectionately deemed a “pandemic project,” focused on the relationship between national identity and the ideal of Canadian masculinity through the medium of sport during the 1972 Summit Series. This research has since been featured in the edited collection Reaching the Summit published in 2022. However, her main interest area lies in the history of emotions and its relation to experiences of medical treatment in the nineteenth century. 

Outside of academia, Carter is a dedicated public historian having worked at both Fort George National Historic Site and McFarland House in Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON; the Brown Homestead in St. Catharines, ON; and most recently had the opportunity to fulfil a childhood dream to work at Fanshawe Pioneer Village in her hometown of London, ON. When not working, you can probably find her reading, baking, or building Lego. 
 
Carter’s CGS-D funded project focuses on the experience and emotional performance of pain by British soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. By placing her research into a transnational context, Carter intends to examine how emerging nineteenth century ideas of nation, race, and embodied gender shaped the emotional realities of men fighting for and alongside the British Empire.