Mila Daskalova is a British Academy & LKAS Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She completed her PhD at the University of Strathclyde in 2022, and her doctoral thesis won the Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. Her first book, The Nineteenth-Century Asylum Periodical: Britain, America and Beyond, will be published by Cambridge University Press. She has contributed to the Curran Index of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (read more here) and the AHRC-funded ‘Piston, Pen & Press’ database. In 2021 she founded and edited Podslon (Bulgaria), an art and literature magazine dedicated to mental health and illness. She also won the GP Johnston Prize in Scottish Book History and Bibliography (2020).

Her new project, ‘Reading Madness: The Literary Origins of Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry,’ presents a detailed transatlantic exploration of nineteenth-century psychiatry’s reciprocal conversation with literature. Early psychiatric writings demonstrate physicians’ reliance on literary language, poetic quotations, and references to literary characters to illustrate their points and establish their professional expertise in insanity. As the century progressed, however, psychiatry leaned towards scientific positivism, thus seemingly renouncing its kinship with literature. Covering the period 1820s-90s, this project will present an indepth study of the ways in which psychiatric theory and practice responded to various phenomena in literary production (such as the professionalisation of literary criticism, the proliferation of verse and life writing, and the rise of the sensation novel, realism, and science fiction/utopian writing). It will draw on a wide range of archival and published material, to suggest that, instead of a clear-cut rift, literature and psychiatry experienced parallel processes of professionalisation that obscured but did not stop the exchanges between
the fields.

• Nineteenth-century literature and culture
• Literature and medicine
• History of medicine and psychiatry
• Medical humanities
• Periodical studies

Research groups

• Victorian

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Prior publications

• Royal Historical Society Postgraduate Research Support Grants (2020)
• SGSAH Engagement Fund (2020)
• Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference Travel Award (2019)
• SGSAH Doctoral Training Partnership (2018-2021)

Prizes, awards & distinctions

• 2020: G. P. Johnston Prize in Book History and Bibliography (Edinburgh Bibliographical Society)
• 2023: Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize (Research Society for Victorian Periodicals)

Research fellowships

• 2023 - 2023: SGSAH Postdoctoral Fellowship
• 2024 - 2027: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship
• 2024 - 2027: Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Fellowship

Professional & learned societies

• 2023: Conference Programme Committee Member, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
• 2023: Member, British Society for Literature and Science
• 2020: Member, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals