Thiseas Nikolaos Stefanatos (UCL) - 2024-25 Students
ucratnt@ucl.ac.uk

Mediterranean Madness: Modern Psychiatry and Orthodox Mysticism in the British Ionian Islands Protectorate 1809-1864

I am exploring the entanglement between modern psychiatry and traditional Greek Orthodox practices in the British Ionian islands protectorate. This obscure colony was home to the Psychiatric Hospital of Corfu, the first ever modern psychiatric institution built by the British in 1838, that was largely influenced by French schools of psychiatry as ‘moral management’. Yet it was also home to the monastery of Saint Gerasimos, Patron Saint of Kefalonia, protector of the spirit and of the insane. My work is a social history of how Kefalonians constructed the ideas of the inner psyche, defining psychiatry as broadly as possible and observing it in the everyday languages people employed to heal their souls.

Principal Supervisor: Professor Sonu Shamdasani