Rate My Professor Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen

Roberts-Pedersen's research focuses on the cultural and social histories of warfare in the modern world, particularly the history of psychiatry, psychiatric patients, and treatment regimes during wartime. Her ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) project, ‘Unquiet Minds: Psychiatry in World War Two and its aftermaths’ (2016-2018), explores how the war influenced psychiatric theory and practice through encounters with combatants, POWs, Holocaust survivors, and children separated from parents. She has also led the ARC Discovery Project ‘A Century of Sex and the Australian Military, 1914-2020’ (2021-2023, with Prof Noah Riseman, Dr Tristan Moss, Dr Alana Piper) and secured additional funding from the College of Human and Social Futures, totaling over $524,778 across 11 grants.

Her publications include the monograph Freedom, Faction, Fame and Blood: British Soldiers of Conscience in Greece, Spain and Finland (Sussex Academic Press, 2010), Making Mental Health: A Critical History (Routledge, 2025), and Making Mental Health: A Global History (2023). Key articles are ‘The Hard School: Physical Treatments for War Neurosis in Britain during the Second World War’ (Social History of Medicine, 2016), ‘Impelled to Reminiscence: Millais Culpin, Military Psychiatry, and the Politics of Therapy’ (Health and History, 2015), ‘Damage: The 'war neurotic' serviceman comes home’ (History Australia, 2014), and others. She has guest-edited special issues of Health and History (2018) on trauma histories in Australasia and Australian Journal of Politics and History (2018) on European entanglements. Through her scholarship, she advances understanding of war trauma, PTSD, and psychiatric responses to conflict.