Meet the Team
Dr Rebecca Wright
Rebecca is an Associate Professor of History at Northumbria University, Newcastle and the Principal Investigator on Carbon Bodies. Her past research has explored cultural approaches to energy, drawing on methodologies from the history of ideas and the history of emotions. She increasingly became interested in the intersections of energy and health, which led to a smaller exploratory Research Fellowship supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Centre of For Future Health at the University of York in 2018. It was during this time that she became interested in heat as a mediator between our bodies and energy systems, which led to the Carbon Bodies project. You can find out more about her past research here.
As the PI on Carbon Bodies project, Rebecca is documenting how warmth has been framed in policy and a central feature of the welfare state, which will be part of a larger book project Cold Society.
Dr Kathy Davies
Kathy joined Carbon Bodies as the Research Fellow in Autumn 2025. She is leading a strand of research on warm spaces and shared heat, exploring what community heating practices and politics reveal about access to warmth. She is also curating the project exhibition that opens at Newcastle City Library in October 2026.
Kathy is an historian of energy and environment with wider expertise in oral history, transdisciplinarity, and public engagement. Her wider research focuses on social, cultural, and political histories of domestic energy, air quality, and environmental change in everyday life. Before joining Northumbria University, Kathy was Archives By-Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge (Lent 2025) and the British Library’s first Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow in Environment and Sustainability in 2025. For the past two years (2023-2025) she also led History Lab Plus, the national network for early career historians at the Institute of Historical Research.
Dr Hannah J. Elizabeth
Hannah was the Research Fellow on the Carbon Bodies project for 2024/2025, and now a member of the Advisory Board. They are a cultural historian of health, welfare, childhood, sexuality and activism. They are particularly interested in how different experience or identities related to health felt to different people or communities. In the past they have worked on histories of public health and activism, particularly around HIV, childhood, and sexuality. You can find out about their previous research projects and find links to their published work here.
On the Carbon Bodies project Hannah was looking at histories of fuel poverty and heating in the North East. They were especially interested in how children experienced fuel poverty and home heating, and how regimes of thermal care differed across age groups, from infants to older people. They also explored how different families and communities managed their thermal needs and the varied activism which emerged in the North East around domestic heating and health.
Advisory Board
- Professor Matthew Kelly, Professor of Modern History, Northumbria University
- Helen Stockton, Head of Research, National Energy Action
- David Green OBE, Chair Warmworks Scotland
- Lizzy Baker, Archives Lead, Tyne & War Archives and North East Museums
- Dr Hannah J. Elizabeth, Research Fellow, University of Strathclyde
The banner image is an image of Raynaud’s Phenomenon, Thermal Vision Research 2015.. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection. [Accessed 17 of March 2017] https://wellcomecollection.org/works/gh3kerb5.