Watch the 2025 Frances Ivens Lecture by Professor Roberta Bivins
On 24 June 2025, CHASE was honoured to welcome Professor Roberta Bivins from the Department of History at the University of Warwick, to give this year’s Frances Ivens Lecture.
Beginning in 2016, the annual Frances Ivens Lecture is a public event hosted by the University of Liverpool and the Liverpool Medical Institution. It is named after Mary Hannah Frances Ivens (1870-1944), an obstetrician, gynaecologist and the first woman appointed to a hospital consultant post in Liverpool.
This year’s lecture, titled ‘From deceptive mothers to deadbeat dads: DNA ‘fingerprinting’ and state family-making in Thatcher's Britain’, explored the ways in which migrant and ethnic communities in Britain, whilst often considered medically 'hard-to-reach', have in fact played a vital role in UK biomedical innovation.
The swift diffusion and legal acceptance of one such innovation, DNA profiling, relied on demand from new migrants and their families. Moreover, the adoption of DNA evidence in migration appeals, in turn, powered important changes not just at the border but across British society. Professor Bivins explored this through discussion of the emergence of 'genetic borders' and their unexpected effects on understandings of families and fatherhood since the mid-1980s.
Professor Sally Sheard, Executive Dean of the Institute of Population Health, Andrew Geddes and John Rankin Professor of Modern History and former Director of CHASE responded to Professor Bivins lecture, highlighting the importance of Professor Bivins’ work which demonstrates how historical accounts are important for contemporary policymaking, and particularly noted the ways in which Professor Bivins’ lecture illustrated the hidden conflicts, inequalities and injustices within state policy surrounding the use of DNA profiling.
Professor Roberta Bivins has been at the University of Warwick since 2008, promoted to Professor of History in 2016, she has completed terms as Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine and two terms as the Course Director of the MA in the History of Medicine, as well as serving in several leading administrative capacities.
Professor Bivins is an internationally recognized expert on the history of medicine, and her extensive portfolio of funded research and published work has covered a wide range of key themes and issues, including: the history of alternative medicine, the social history of mental health and illness, a cultural history of the NHS (the focus of a 5-year Wellcome-Trust funded project, to investigate what the NHS meant – in everyday, emotional and political terms – to a diverse public). Professor Bivins' current research explores the impacts of health technologies, and particularly technologies of medical surveillance, at Britain's national borders and in British homes (Bivins 2021, 2023). Across her historical research she has asked questions about whose bodies, whose cultures, and whose environments of embodiment operate as the standard or norm in developing emerging technological and health interventions. You can find out more about Professor Roberta Bivins via the University of Warwick website.
We are delighted to be able to share a recording of this year’s Ivens lecture here.
Note of clarification from Professor Roberta Bivins
In the case discussed around 00:11:47 on the recording, it’s useful to know that Andrew left the UK as a small child (presumably still young enough to travel on his mum's passport) and only sought to return at age 13.