Harry Caton

I am a PhD graduate based in the English department at Exeter. My work is situated within the medical humanities more generally; my interests include disability studies, critical theory, child studies, and historicisms. 

My PhD thesis - Poster Perfect: Chrononormativity, Charity Culture, and the Crip Child - concerns the history, ideology, and economic implications of the popular figure of the disabled poster child, as portrayed in charity advertising. My project starts with this child's origins in the Victorian and Romantic periods; spans its development across evolving scientific discourses of eugenics and adolescence, as well as emerging theories of advertising and consumerism; and moves through to its still-popular usage within the present day.

 
Particularly concerned with the theoretical aspects of this figure, I hope to build a critical framework based around the interaction between the perceived physical inadequacies of childhood and disability. This connection, I argue, is as-yet understudied within the apparatuses of disability studies or the medical humanities. Drawing upon and combining critical sources ranging from Lee Edelman and Kathryn Bond Stockton's theories of the child to Robert McRuer and Lennard J. Davis' ideas of ablenormativity, I take the growing disabled child first, exploring its construction and popular representation.

In 2021, I was awarded the College of Humanities Home Studentship for my current PhD project. In 2025, I passed my viva with minor typos, examined internally by Dr. Michael Flexer, and externally by Professor Stuart Murray.

Currently based between London and Exeter, I am supervised by Professor Laura Salisbury and Professor Jana Funke.