Dr Janet Greenlees
Reader in Health History
Department of Social SciencesJanet Greenlees is a Reader in Health History within the Department of Social Sciences. Her research interests concern modern American and British history. She is currently working on two distinct research projects: the first relates to relationships between poverty, pregnancy and medicine, while the second is a study into forced adoption practices in Scotland.
Her research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, ESRC, AHRC and numerous charities. She is currently Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded project One-Parent Families and Vulnerability Network. This network seeks to connect historians, archivists and third-sector partners from the OECD countries of England, Ireland, Scotland, Northern Ireland, New Zealand and Australia. In March 2025, we launched an animation which highlights the challenges, resilience and lived realities of one-parent families, Time for a New Chapter.
Janet’s previous research centred around gender and labour, feeding into two monographs: When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and Female Labour Power: Women Workers’ Influence on Business Practices in the British and American Cotton Industries, 1780-1860 (Ashgate, 2007).
Janet is Glasgow Caledonian University Co-Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH), a research collaboration between scholars at Glasgow Caledonian and Strathclyde University.
She is a Co-Editor for the journal Social History of Medicine and served a term as managing editor between 2024-25. She is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA).