Dr Jen Kain
Small Group Project 2023-24
Eugenics, the British Empire, and the creation of the global migration system
With Esme Cleall & Rachel Bright
Recent scholarship has highlighted how modern migration systems are underpinned by historic attitudes towards race, gender, and productivity. In the British Empire, as elsewhere, immigration controls and naturalisation processes favoured the white and able-bodied. Drawing on the applicants’ own research findings, and broader research within Migration, Legal, and Disability Studies, as well as Medical and Colonial History, this project will create an interdisciplinary network in order to develop our understanding of the lived experience of eugenics, both at the border and beyond.
More informationResearch outcomes
Reconsidering the history of eugenics and discrimination in migration control. Migration Studies, 13(1)
Areas of interest
Cohort
Biography
Her first monograph - entitled Insanity and Immigration Control in New Zealand and Australia 1860-1930 - was published in November 2019 with Palgrave Macmillan's Mental Health in Historical Perspective series.
Jen completed a PhD at Northumbria University in 2015 and an MA in the History of the Americas at Newcastle University in 2010. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Her research focuses on health-related immigration control in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is more broadly interested in maritime history, the histories of eugenics, migration, mental illness and the colonial histories of New Zealand and Australia.
Jen is currently developing an article which deals with early twentieth-century bureaucratic responses to syphilitic merchant seamen in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a further article on the 1901 White Australia Policy in terms of its eugenic health clauses.
Biographical details correct as of 12.03.26