Kirstie Stage (Kirsty Neale)

My doctoral research is supervised by Professor Lucy Delap and Jonathan Pledge, and is kindly funded through an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP studentship between the University of Cambridge and the British Library. My thesis is provisionally entitled ‘Labour and Livelihoods of Disabled People, 1970-2015’. I investigate the cultural mechanisms through which disabled people express, understand, and engage with disability issues within their social and professional lives.

Previously, I was the recipient of the Wellcome Trust Studentship for an MA in the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. My MA dissertation, supervised by Professor Mathew Thomson and Dr Claire Shaw, tracked the development of the National Union of the Deaf (f.1976), a Deaf-led pressure group of great significance. Previously, I received a First-Class degree in History and Politics from Queen Mary, University of London. My undergraduate research examined disability activism in twentieth-century Britain, notably the Block Telethon Protests of 1990 and 1992, a project which centred around the oral histories of campaigners.

Outside of academia, I have been a Parliamentary Researcher, selected as a UN Delegate for the Commission on the Status of Women, and worked closely with NGOs to investigate the intersection between gender and disability. In 2022, I co-founded the UK Disability History and Heritage Hub.