Contact
Biography
I am a cultural historian of modern Europe, with an emphasis on women's and gender history, embodied experience, sexuality, and intimacy. My work to date has focused on the late Russian Empire and fin-de-si猫cle France, often in comparative and transnational perspective. Methodologically, I aim to read institutional and vernacular sources in counterpoint wherever possible, as a means to explore the distance between official expectations and everyday practice. Other threads in my research include urban history, cultural networks across Europe, women's educational and professional mobility, medical expertise and women's health, music, and dance.
I joined the Department of History at the 海角黑料 in 2024 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow. Before this, I held the Barnes-Whitehead History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Auckland | Waipapa Taumata Rau (2022), returning to the institution where I had completed my undergraduate and MA degrees. I completed my DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2021, under the supervision of Associate Professors Julia Mannherz and Christina de Bellaigue.
My current book project, Feminine Feelings: Women and Sensation in Paris and St Petersburg, 1900-1914, has grown out of my doctoral research. Taking the two cities as intertwined case studies within European modernity, it seeks to illuminate the sensory contours of women's everyday lives and to trace how sensory experience contributed to the creation of gendered identities. I argue that gender shaped both the array of sensations available to women and how those sensory encounters became meaningful within wider cultural and social frameworks. Anchored in archival, print, visual, and musical sources, the book approaches femininity as embodied practice: a malleable identity continually reinscribed through an accumulation of small gestures, materialised through a series of sensory cues.
As a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, I am developing a new project on women's sexual health, bodily habits, and intimate experience in comparative European perspective at the turn of the twentieth century. This research seeks to reframe women's sexual health as a series of embodied and emotional encounters, shifting attention from regulation to experience, from sexual discourse to sexual practice, and from institutional knowledge to the intimate calculations through which women navigated risk, desire, bodily autonomy, and care. Drawing on patient files, court records, medical literature, hygiene manuals, women's periodicals, and autobiographical writings, it examines how experiences of pain and pleasure shaped women's sexual practices and the healthcare they received.
Recent Publications
SASHA RASMUSSEN, 2023. Historical Reflections/R茅flexions Historiques. 49(1), 103-125
SASHA RASMUSSEN, 2023. Arts et Savoirs: Figures du Sentir. 20, 8
SASHA RASMUSSEN, 2021. Cultural and Social History. 18(2), 221-242