Dr George Morris

I completed my BA, MPhil and PhD at Cambridge. My thesis, Confession and Intimacy in England, 1851-1913, examines the history of confession as an intimate practice in England through four microhistorical case studies. Throughout, I seek to use confession to illustrate broader themes, drawing on cases relating to medical surgery, divorce law, detective work, legal practice, obscenity legislation and trance mediumship. Overall, the thesis argues that confession was not only the site of broader cultural anxieties about gender and sexuality, but that it was a practice which united proponents and opponents in awareness of its radical, and potentially threatening, intimacy. It thus allows us to construct a history of intimacy in modern Britain with broader implications.

My PhD was funded by the AHRC, in addition to which I was an Honorary Vice-Chancellor's Scholar. In October-November 2019 I was Trinity Hall Exchange Fellow at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, and from January 2020 I held a three-month AHRC Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.. I was awarded the 2020 Duncan Tanner Prize for my article on the life of the trance medium Rosalie Thompson, which was published the following year.