Alison M. Downham Moore

Biography and/or project

Alison Downham Moore is a conceptual and intellectual historian of Europe who has published widely on the history of French and German psychiatry and on the long history of medicine and of sexuality. She has also written about historical theory,sexuality historiography, genocide historiography, and the history of European medical ideas about digestion. In recent years she has developed her training in biomedical sciences with a view to enriching her expertise in histories of biology, health, nutrition and disease. She is currently working on a history of medical ideas about sexuality and ageing.

She is author of the 2015 book Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, masochism and historical teleology; co-author with Peter Cryle of Frigidity, an intellectual history (2011), editor of Sexing Political Culture in the History of France (2012), and co-editor with Manon Mathias of Gut Feelings and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture (2018).

She is Associate Professor of modern European history at Western Sydney University.