
Contact Information
810 S. Wight Street M/C 466
Urbana, IL 61801
Office Hours
Research Interests
History of the human sciences
Modern Britain and Europe
Gender and Sexuality
Research Description
Teri Chettiar is a historian of modern Britain and Europe whose research focuses on intersections between the psychological sciences and the politics of democracy in the twentieth century, particularly around child, family, and community health initiatives. She is currently finishing a book manuscript, entitled The Psychiatric Family: How Private Life Became Political in Welfare-State Britain, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. It examines how a post-war revolution in British psychiatry transformed both democratic welfare politics and what counted as emotional health—and how the two came to be seen as deeply interconnected. It reveals how, between 1945 and 1979, citizens’ emotional lives came to be understood as the great social equalizer, and lifelong heterosexual monogamous relationships were cast as the privileged basis for stable democracy. She has published articles related to this book project in Journal of British Studies, History of Psychology, History of the Human Sciences, and History of Medicine. She is also mapping out a new project, tentatively entitled “Inventing the Global Child: Science, Humanitarianism, and the End of Empire,” which investigates the central role of the newly emerging child development sciences in shaping British, French, and American postcolonial socio-economic development initiatives in the decades after 1945.
Education
Ph.D. Northwestern University, 2013
Recent Publications
Chettiar, T. (Accepted/In press). Counselling for connection: making queer relationships during Britain's sexual revolution. Medical Humanities, [012347]. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2021-012347
Chettiar, T. (2016). "More than a Contract": The emergence of a state-supported marriage welfare service and the politics of emotional life in Post-1945 Britain. Journal of British Studies, 55(3), 566-591. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2016.55
Chettiar, T. (2015). Review: M. Thomson's Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement. Journal of British Studies, 54(01), 246-247. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2014.248
Chettiar, T. (2015). Treating marriage as "the sick entity": Gender, emotional life, and the psychology of marriage improvement in Postwar Britain. History of Psychology, 18(3), 270-282. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039523
Chettiar, T. (2012). Democratizing mental health: Motherhood, therapeutic community and the emergence of the psychiatric family at the Cassel Hospital in post-Second World War Britain. History of the Human Sciences, 25(5), 107-122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695112466516