Angus Gowland

Academic position: Reader in Intellectual History

Department: History

Biography:

Angus is an intellectual historian of early modern Europe, with interests in the fields of psychology, medicine, and philosophy (natural and moral). His research has concentrated on ideas about melancholy, especially as they are recorded in the most famous English literary work on this subject, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621-1651). He has written about the relationships between psychological, medical, philosophical and spiritual ideas about human nature in European learning in this period; in the literary expressions and appropriations of such ideas; and in the ways in which they were embedded in their contemporary religious and political contexts.

Research Projects:

The history of melancholy (and ideas about melancholy), and more broadly, psychological medicine, in early modern Europe. Angus has recently completed a research article on the legal rights of the insane in early modern Europe.

Teaching:

Angus teaches a final-year Special Subject on theories of body (physiology) and soul (psychology) in the European Renaissance.