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About
Tim Snelson is associate professor in media history at the University of East Anglia. Tim’s research addresses the relationships between media, social and medical histories, presents and futures, focusing particularly on popular film and media genres (horror, true crime, psychological thrillers); media and mental health; youth and digital media; material cultures; and screen heritage. His research has been published in journals including Media History, History of the Human Sciences, Science Museum Group Journal and Cultural Studies, and in monographs Phantom Ladies: Hollywood Horror and the Home Front (Rutgers University Press, 2015) and Demons of the Mind: Psychiatry and Cinema in the Long 1960s (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). He was primary investigator on two recent Arts and Humanities Research Council grants on the intersecting histories and material cultures of media and mental health, researched and delivered in collaboration with the British Science Association and Science Museum Group. Tim is on the editorial board of the Science Museum Group Journal.
Tim’s research is motivated by the drive to tell new and more inclusive stories through the use of #archives, material culture and digital media practice. Whether this is using archive film to bring herstories of women in STEM to life for museum visitors, thinking across medical and media archives to give voice to experiences of mental health service users, making documentaries to communicate the lived heritage of skateboarders on the Southbank, or using creative reuse projects to engage young people and promote wellbeing. Whilst at LSE he will undertake research on childhood and (digital) play that will seek to historicise contemporary anxieties around digital media’s ‘rewiring’ of children; and access the value of the theories and practice of influential play therapists Margaret Lowenfeld and Dora Kalff to understanding contemporary play contexts (digital and non-digital).