Pádraig Nolan

I graduated with a double first-class honours degree in English Literature and History from Trinity College Dublin in 2021. In October 2021, I joined the inaugural cohort of Oxford’s Women’s, Gender and Queer History master’s programme. During my master’s study, I developed an interest in the history of medical transition in Britain, going on to write my master’s thesis on the case of British trans man Michael Dillon. Receiving Distinctions in my master’s thesis and degree overall, from October 2022 I will pursue a larger history of medical transition in twentieth-century Britain as a DPhil candidate in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at Oxford. This research, co-supervised by Prof. Dan Healy and Dr. Sloan Mahone, has been awarded an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP Studentship, a Clarendon Foundation Scholarship, and Wadham’s David Richards Scholarship in History. Since spring 2022, I have served as a researcher and oral historian in the Gender Identity Research and Education Foundation’s ‘Legacy of Kindness’ project. Working alongside the Bishopsgate Institute, this project will produce an archive and exhibition exploring the role of the Foundation in the championing of trans and intersex civil and medical recognition in Britain since the 1990s. I hope my research will find similarly wide-reaching, extra-academic engagement during and after my DPhil, particularly in healthcare policy.