Lena Ferriday

I joined the Newcastle University in January 2026, as Research Associate on the Wellcome Trust-funded project 'Accessing the Wellbeing Commons', which explores who can and can't access watery spaces for bathing. My research within the project looks at outdoor and wild swimming in the UK, with a particular focus on Dartmoor, in Devon.

Broadly, I am interested in questions of how environments acquired meaning in the past, and the role tangible encounters between bodies and matter has played in this process. I am currently working on a monograph that examines individuals’ embodied encounters with the environments of rural Britain in the nineteenth century.