Join us for our next installment in our policial mind series with speaker Dr Surekha Davies and chaired by David Morgan.

In Humans: A Monstrous History, Dr Surekha Davies explores how societies define the human by constructing the monstrous. From a political-psychoanalytic perspective, monsters function as projections figures onto which we displace what cannot be tolerated in ourselves: vulnerability, aggression, dependency, or difference. This process sustains social cohesion through splitting, idealisation, and scapegoating.

Davies traces how race, gender, and nation are built on such psychic defences—what Klein might call the paranoid-schizoid position—where the ‘Other’ is held responsible for internal conflict. As the book moves through empires, colonialism, and corporate capitalism, we see how monstrosity becomes a tool of control: a way of managing anxiety by externalising threat.

Yet Davies also gestures toward a reparative project. If monstrosity reveals the unconscious of power, then recognising our projections opens the possibility for integration, reparation, and political transformation. This is not just a history of monsters, but of the psychic mechanisms that underwrite dehumanisation—and how we might begin to undo them.

Dr Surekha Davies is a British historian of science, art, and ideas, as well as a writer and public intellectual. Her work explores how societies have defined humanity through concepts of monstrosity, race, and cultural difference, particularly in the early modern period. 

She is the author of Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which received the Morris D. Forkosch Prize and the Roland H. Bainton Prize, and was a finalist for the Pickstone Prize. Her latest book, Humans: A Monstrous History, was published by the University of California Press in February 2025. 

Please note: This event will be recorded and available for 1 week to all registered participants.

Concession tickets are available, for students, BPAS candidates and NHS trainees. Please email [email protected] if you are unsure if you qualify for a concession ticket.

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