Role
Dr Verusca Calabria is Associate Professor of Mental Health Histories and Research Coordinator in the Nottingham Institute of Health and Social Care, School of Social Sciences. Her research sits at the intersection of the social history and heritage of mental healthcare, with particular interests in deinstitutionalisation and community care, memory and heritage, and participatory and co-produced approaches to researching the past of health institutions. She specialises in oral history and participatory methodologies and has a longstanding interest in the ethics and emotional labour of qualitative research.
As Research Coordinator, she contributes to the development of research culture within the Nottingham Institute of Health and Social Care, supporting research development, collaboration and the development of colleagues.
Alongside her institutional research leadership, Verusca has an extensive portfolio of national and international research leadership. Since 2023, she has led the Heritage and Public Engagement Working Group of the European Healthcare Histories (EuroHealthHist) COST Action, bringing together researchers and heritage practitioners from across Europe and beyond. She is also a member of the Action's Management Committee.
At NTU, Verusca co-leads the Oral History and the Multiple Exclusion Research Groups. She is a long-standing Trustee of the Oral History Society, Co-Chair of its Higher Education Special Interest Group and Editor for International Work for the Oral History Journal.
Career overview
Between 2005 and 2015, Verusca worked as an Oral History and Heritage Consultant, working in partnership with community groups, arts and voluntary organisations to collect, preserve and disseminate the histories of marginalised and under-represented communities. During this period, she developed extensive experience in designing and managing community-based oral history and heritage projects, training oral historians and creating oral history archives and public-facing heritage outputs.
Verusca completed her PhD at Nottingham Trent University in 2020. Her doctoral research explored changing practices of mental healthcare during the transition from the mental hospital to community care, using participatory action research and oral history to work collaboratively with former patients and retired staff.
Since joining NTU, her research has developed a strong focus on participatory approaches to mental health history and heritage, memory and deinstitutionalisation, alongside a growing international and comparative dimension. She has also developed research on emotional labour, ethics of care and researcher wellbeing in oral history.
Verusca has extensive experience of doctoral supervision and examination and welcomes enquiries from prospective doctoral researchers working in areas related to mental health histories, oral history, memory and heritage, deinstitutionalisation and community care, and participatory methodologies.
Research areas
Verusca's research examines the social history and heritage of mental healthcare, with particular interests in deinstitutionalisation, community care, institutional memory and the ways in which histories of mental health are remembered, represented and mobilised in the present. Her work brings together oral history, memory studies, critical heritage approaches and participatory research, with a strong emphasis on co-production with people with lived experience, practitioners and communities.
From 2022 to 2025, Verusca led the £98,000 National Lottery Heritage Fund project Fifty Years of Middle Street, a large-scale participatory history of a community mental health day centre in Nottinghamshire. The project involved more than 300 participants and used oral history alongside art, poetry, film, exhibitions and archival work to explore the changing meanings of community mental healthcare.
Her more recent research has developed an increasingly comparative and international focus, examining the afterlives of deinstitutionalisation and the ways in which mental health histories are remembered through museums, heritage sites, archives and communities. Her comparative work has included research on deinstitutionalisation in England and Ireland and research on mental health heritage and memory in Britain, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.
A further strand of Verusca's research examines the methodological and ethical dimensions of oral history, including emotional labour, researcher wellbeing, ethics of care and the challenges of undertaking emotionally demanding research. Her recent publications include the co-authored book Emotional Labour in Oral History Research (Routledge, 2025).
Her principal research interests include:
- social histories and heritage of mental healthcare
- deinstitutionalisation and community care
- oral history theory and practice
- participatory and co-produced research
- memory studies and institutional memory
- mental health museums and heritage
- emotional labour, ethics of care and researcher wellbeing
- comparative and transnational histories of mental healthcare.
External activity
Verusca holds a number of national and international research leadership and professional roles. Since 2023, she has led Working Group 5, Heritage and Public Engagement, within the European Healthcare Histories (EuroHealthHist) COST Action and is a member of the Action's Management Committee. She is also involved in the European COST Action Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change.
She is a long-standing Trustee of the Oral History Society, Co-Chair of its Higher Education Special Interest Group and Editor for International Work for the Oral History Journal. In 2026, she was lead organiser of the Oral History Festival at Nottingham Trent University, delivered in partnership with the Oral History Society and the East Midlands Oral History Archive.
Verusca regularly contributes to the wider research community through doctoral examination, external examining, peer review and grant assessment. She has reviewed research funding applications for organisations including the Wellcome Trust and British Academy and acts as a reviewer for academic journals and publishers.
Her external engagement also includes collaboration with museums, archives, mental health organisations, heritage organisations and community partners in the UK and internationally.
Publications
Journal Articles
Calabria, V. (2023) The use of oral history in researching psychiatry’s past, Rivista Sperimentale di Freniatria, 3, 110-118.
Calabria, V., Harding J. (2023) Oral history in UK doctoral research: extent of use and researcher preparedness for emotionally demanding work, Oral History Review, 50.1. DOI: 10.1080/00940798.2023.2175698.
Calabria, V. (2022) Learning and Doing Oral History in Higher Education in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Oral History Journal, vol 50, no 2.
Calabria, V. (2022) With care in the community, everything goes: using participatory oral history to re-examine the provision of care in the old state mental hospitals, Oral History Journal, vol 50, no 1, 93-103.
Calabria, V., Bailey D. (2021) Participatory action research and oral history as natural allies in mental health research, Qualitative Journal. Url: https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941211039963.
Palmer, D., Williams, L., White, S., Chenga, C., Calabria, V., Branch, D., Arundal, S., Storer, L., Ash, C., Cuthill, C. and Bezuayehu, H., 2009. ‘No one knows like we do’ — the narratives of mental health service users trained as researchers. Journal of Public Mental Health, 8(4), pp.18-28.
Calabria, V. (2026). Slow Practices of Remembering a Mental Health Day Centre. Memory Studies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980251413188.
Calabria, V. and Oswald U. (2025) It Was Like a Family’: Nurses as Change Makers in Mental Hospitals. Family and Community History, 28 (3). DOI: 10.1080/14631180.2025.2583815.
Calabria, V. and Cullen L. T. (2024). Deinstitutionalisation and the move to community care: comparing the changing dimensions of mental health care in Ireland to England post-1922, History of Psychiatry, 35 (2): 141-157. DOI: 10.1177/0957154X241231057.
Books
Barnard, A., Calabria, V. and Griffiths, L. (2023 forthcoming) Key Themes in Health and Social Care: A Companion to Learning, 2nd edition. Routledge.
Harding J. and Calabria V. (2025). Emotional Labour in Oral History: the Hidden Toll. Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003454847-1.
Book Chapters
Calabria, V. (2023) An exploration of the function of nostalgia in oral histories of institutional care, in Rebecca Wynter, Rob Ellis, and Jennifer Wallis (eds), Anniversaries, Memory and Mental Health in International Historical Perspective: Faith in Reform, Palgrave Macmillan
Calabria, V., Ellis, R. (2022 forthcoming) ‘The old concept of asylum has a valid place’: patient experiences of the psychiatric asylums as therapeutic environments in the twentieth century, in Elisabeth Punzi and Linda Steele (eds) Psychiatric and Disability Institutions after Deinstitutionalisation: Memory, Sites of Conscience, and Social Justice, UBC press, Disability Culture and Politics series.
Calabria, V. (2022 forthcoming) ‘There was an awful lot that was good and that was necessary’: the hidden heritage of the old state mental hospitals, in Elisabeth Punzi, Christoph Singer, Nika Söderlund, Cornelia Wächter (eds) Narrating the Heritage of Psychiatry, Brill Press.
Calabria, V. (2022 forthcoming) An exploration of the function of nostalgia in oral histories of institutional care, in Rebecca Wynter, Rob Ellis, and Jennifer Wallis (eds), Anniversaries, Memory and Mental Health in International Historical Perspective: Faith in Reform,Palgrave Macmillan, Mental Health in Historical Perspectives series.
Calabria, V., Bailey D. and Bowpitt, G. 2021 More than bricks and mortar: meaningful care practices in the old state mental hospitals. In Voices in the History of Madness: Patient and Practitioner Perspectives, eds. Rob Ellis, Sarah Kendall and Steven J. Taylor. Palgrave Macmillan.
Calabria, V. 2019. ‘Self-reflexivity in oral history research: the role of positionality and emotions’, in Voices of Illness: negotiating meaning and identity, Amsterdam: Brill Press.
Calabria, V. 2016. ‘Insider stories from the asylum: peer and staff-patient relationships’, in Joanna Davidson and Yomna Saber (eds) Narrating Illness: prospects and constraints, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.
La Haije, M., Nautiyal, K., Králová, K. and Calabria V. (2026). Transformations of care and welfare through the lens of slow memory, in Jenny Wüstenberg and Joanna Wawrzyniak(eds)Slowing Down Memory Studies: Theory and Practice of Remembering for Transformative Change. Bloomsbury. In press.
Calabria, V. (2024). There was an awful lot that was good and that was necessary’: the hidden heritage of the old state mental hospitals, in Elisabeth Punzi (ed) Narrating the Heritage of Psychiatry, Brill Press, pp. 202-221. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004519848_013.
Calabria, V. and Ellis, R. (2024). ‘The old concept of asylum has a valid place’: patient experiences of the psychiatric asylums as therapeutic environments in the twentieth century, in Elisabeth Punzi and Linda Steele (eds) Psychiatric and Disability Institutions after Deinstitutionalisation: Memory, Sites of Conscience, and Social Justice, UBC Press, Disability Culture and Politics series, pp. 126-144. DOI: https://doi.org/10.59962/9780774869348-010.
Opinion Piece
Calabria, V. (2020) “Daylight robbery, but they called it care in the community’: Revisiting asylums 30 years on’. Asylum, the Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry, 27.4: 14-16.
Reports
Calabria, V., Reynolds, C. and Harding J. (2027). Participatory Practice and Shared Learning in the Oral History Movement: Reflections from the Oral History Festival. Evaluation Report. Nottingham Trent University and Oral History Society. Forthcoming.
Howard, F. and Calabria, V. (2025). Fifty Years of Middle Street Resource Centre: The Heritage of Wellbeing in the Community. Evaluation Report. Heritage Lottery Fund.