Esme Cleall is Senior Lecturer in the History of the British Empire at the University of Sheffield. She researches and teaches on the social and cultural history of the British Empire; the politics of difference; and race and disability in nineteenth-century Britain.

She studied at Sheffield as an Undergraduate and as a Masters student. She did he PhD in History at UCL, spending an additional year as a cross-disciplinary training fellow in the Department of Anthropology. She then taught at Liverpool for two years before returning to Sheffield in September 2012.

Her first book, Missionary Discourses of Difference: negotiating otherness in the British Empire, 1840-1900, explored the difference of gender and race through the writings of British missionaries stationed in nineteenth-century India and southern Africa.

Her second book, Colonising Disability: impairment and otherness across Britain and its Empire, c. 1800-1914, came out with CUP in 2022. It was funded by an AHRC-leadership fellowship and explores issues of disability, philanthropy, self-advocacy, discrimination, and immigration.

Esme's current work builds on her analysis of disability to experiences and representations of disability, the body, health, and mental distress in nineteenth and twentieth-century imperial thought. Key themes include reproduction, trauma, violence, and emotion.

Biographical details correct as of 12.03.26