Dr Simeon Koole

Email: [email protected]

Office: 1.H026, School of Humanities Building

X: @SimeonKoole

I specialise in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history with a focus on Britain and its global entanglements. I have a particular interest in the history of the senses and sexuality, and work at the intersection of queer studies, the history of science, phenomenology, global, and urban history.

My first book, Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age (University of Chicago Press, 2024) examines how the understanding, experience, and practice of touch changed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. It argues that touch is central to how we think about ourselves and others, and that changes in touch transformed understandings of what it meant to be embodied. Following often ordinary encounters between individuals across different spaces, from fog-bound streets to basement teashops, the book shows how changes in touch reshaped broader organizing concepts, such as personal space, disability, and the relationship between the mind and body. Tracing this history, I argue, also provides a method for critically reflecting on understandings of embodiment today, particularly vulnerability, capability, and the body as a source of knowledge. For a taster, check out my interview on the New Books Network podcast.

My current book project, Within Worlds: London’s Docks and Everyday Worldmaking After the Steamship, zooms in on a neighbourhood to show how worlds are made by how we inhabit them. It examines how, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the bodies and emotions of docklands inhabitants materialised and modified their connections to distant places, shaping their perceptions of trust, risk, and precariousness. In so doing, the book provides an intimate global history, and a history of how intimacy conditions the horizons of our lives.

This project was funded by an AHRC Research, Development, and Engagement grant (2022-2024), for which I have also led several collaborations. With Ben Mechen, I have co-written an article on the entangled exposure of dock labourers' bodies and the River Thames in the late nineteenth century. Ben and I also collaborated with filmmaker George Clark on a creative nonfiction film exploring past and present precariousness in London's docklands. Sunless Haven (dir. George Clark, 2024) had its world premiere on opening night of Open City Documentary Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. The project was also partnered with architect studio Witherford Watson Mann; you can find William Mann's writings here.

In other publications, I have explored how queer desire served as a way of thinking in—and rethinking—the history of science, and how photography operated as an interpretive event within contested imperial contexts.

Biography

I completed my BA at the University of Oxford, MPhil at the University of Cambridge, and DPhil back at Oxford in 2017, the same year in which I became a Lecturer in Liberal Arts and History at the University of Bristol. I have been a William Alexander Fleet Fellow at Princeton University (2013-14), Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University (2019) and Remarque Institute Fellow at New York University (2023).

Research Supervision

I am glad to supervise PhDs on any topic within the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and its global connections, especially in relation to my research: senses; gender and sexuality; history of science; urban history; global history; photography; disability. Please do get in touch if you would like to discuss a project.

Teaching

I teach in both the History Department and Liberal Arts, an interdisciplinary programme which ranges across the arts and humanities. While at Bristol I have convened the following courses:

• History of the Present (first-year Liberal Arts)
• Brief Encounters: Love, Labour, and Loneliness in Modern London (second-year History)
• Disease, Deviance, and Disability (second-year History)
• Dissertation (third- and fourth-year Liberal Arts)

I have also contributed lectures and seminars to the following courses:

• Urban Worlds: From Ancient Baghdad to Las Vegas (first-year History)
• Rethinking History (second-year History)
• Progress or Peril? The History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (second-year History)
• Experiencing the Aesthetic (second-year Liberal Arts)
• Dissertation (third-year History)
• Approaches to History (MA History)