Alessandro Bianchi
Alessandro's research focuses on a comparative, transnational and cultural history of the perception of madness in early nineteenth-century France and Britain.
8 May 2026
Project Description
‘Madness’ has, historically, functioned as a label for justifying social exclusion, as much as a categorisation within medical diagnostics. By returning to the origins of the psychiatric discipline, I seek to provide a new perspective on the consolidation of this socio-medical category, and thereby aid in its historical deconstruction. Analysing perceptions of madness and the correlated exclusionary social practices within a transnational frame, I ponder the ways in which cultural discourse, scientific thought and specific national institutions and idiosyncrasies converse in the production of socio-medical labels, practices and paradigms. I accordingly propose a comparative history of the social perception of madness in France and Britain through a traditionally French chronology—delimited by the French Revolution of 1789 and the law that instituted asylums in 1838—in order to revise Foucault’s Franco-centric ‘history of mentalities’ concerning madness following Roy Porter’s criticisms. Understanding the social imaginary concerning madness thus commences from the parallel and joint analysis of multiple influential discourses: political (parliamentary discussions), public (newspaper articles), artistic (novels, poems, paintings), medical (published treatises and institutional or administrative bureaucracy), intellectual (philosophical treatises) and popular (lithographs, letters, ephemera). Such discourses interweaved within and across nations, thus defining madness within a cultural web of meaning. Moreover, by placing in conversation micro-historical archival narratives and treatments and representations of madness concerning each of four chosen institutions—two per country—I will foreground how European institutional and national idiosyncrasies contributed to shaping forms of care such as the psychiatric discipline and the emerging institutions of madness: the asylums. It is only by untangling these perspectives and deconstructing the social imaginary of madness that the causality and process of its demonisation and internment can fruitfully be brought to light within and across national borders.
Publications
Alessandro Bianchi and Amberlea Jones, ‘Demythologising Psychiatry: A Collaborative Approach to Deconstructing Extremes in the Historical Perception of Mental Health Care in Britain and France’, Pro Tempore, no. 20 (2026): TBC.
Alessandro Bianchi, ‘The Apotheosis of Longinus’, Durham University History in Politics Journal, Issue 6: Transitions (Winter 2022/23): 31-38.
Conferences and Roundtables
Alessandro Bianchi, ‘Woe in Wedlock: Domestic Troubles and Mental Health in Early Nineteenth-Century France’, Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes on ‘Health and happiness/La santé et le bonheur’, Cardiff University, 8-10 April 2026.
Alessandro Bianchi, Roundtable 6: Interdisciplinarity in European History, Launch Event: European History in the North East, Durham University, Newcastle University and Northumbria University, Lit & Phil Library Newcastle, 15 December 2025.
Alessandro Bianchi, ‘International Forums, Transnational Troubles: Navigating National Boundaries in the Long Nineteenth-Century History of Psychiatry’, Comparing Comparing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Comparative Methods and their Histories, Gegenwart/Literatur, Universität Bonn, 9-11 July 2025.
Alessandro Bianchi, ‘Categories, Conditions, Classifications: The Unstable Meanings of “Aliénation Mentale” in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris’, Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference, King’s College London, 30 May 2025.