Staff profile

Coreen McGuire is a historian of interwar Britain doing interdisciplinary research at the nexus between disability history, medicial history, and science and technology studies. She completed her PhD on the measurement of hearing loss in the British Telephone System at the University of Leeds in the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science. Following this, she took up a postdoctoral position at the University of Bristol and developed research on the historical measurement of respiratory disability as part of the Life of Breath project, a Wellcome funded project which was led jointly by Bristol and Durham.

Her first book, Measuring difference, numbering normal: setting the standards for disability in the inter-war period (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020) is available open-access. Described in (Twentieth Century British History, 2021) as rendering 'visible the long implicit but underexplored connections between biometrics and disability’ (Twentieth Century British History, 2021). It has been internationally praised as: a 'valuable contribution to a vibrant discussion at the intersection of STS and disability studies' (Social History of Medicine, 2020) and a ‘remarkable work [that] can be considered an essential read for any historian and philosopher of science and technology, as well as for those interested in disability studies’ (Canadian Review of Medical History) 

Dr McGuire welcomes requests for research supervision. 

• Science and Medicine

Available for media contact about:

• Disability issues:
• Medical and health research topics:
• Environment and culture:
• Genetics:
• Modern History: Britain & Ireland:

Authored book

• McGuire, Coreen (2020). Measuring difference, numbering normal: Setting the standards for disability in the interwar period. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Chapter in book

• Jones, C. (Published). ‘Inventing amplified telephony: the co-creation of aural technology and disability’. In Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures. Manchester University Press.
• McGuire, C, Virdi, J & Hutton, J (2021). Respiratory technologies and the co-production of breathing in the twentieth century. In Patient voices in Britain, 1840–1948. Hanley, A & Meyer, J Manchester: Manchester University Press. 183-221.
• McGuire, Coreen & Carel, Havi (2019). The Visible and the Invisible: Disability, Assistive Technology, and Stigma. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability. Wasserman, David & Cureton, Adam Oxford: Oxford University Press. 598-615.

Journal Article

• Malpass, Alice, Mcguire, Coreen & Macnaughton, Jane (2022). ‘The body says it’ the difficulty of measuring and communicating sensations of breathlessness. Medical Humanities 48(1): 63-75.
• Binnie, Kate, McGuire, Coreen & Carel, Havi (2021). Objects of safety and imprisonment: Breathless patients’ use of medical objects in a palliative setting. Journal of Material Culture 26(2): 122-141.
• McGuire, Coreen, Macnaughton, Jane & Carel, Havi (2020). The Color of Breath. Literature and Medicine 38(2): 233-238.
• McGuire, Coreen Anne (2019). The categorisation of hearing loss through telephony in inter-war Britain. History and Technology 35(2): 138-155.
• McGuire, Coreen (2019). ‘X-rays don't tell lies’ the Medical Research Council and the measurement of respiratory disability, 1936–1945. The British Journal for the History of Science 52(3): 447-465.
• McGuire, Coreen (2019). Dust to dust. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine 7(5): 383-384.
• Virdi, J & McGuire, C (2018). “Phyllis M. Tookey Kerridge and the Science of Audiometric Standardization in Britain”. The British Journal for the History of Science 51(1).