Health Humanities Research Group

Our research explores the intersection of English, Humanities, Health, Healthcare, and Wellbeing. We meet several times a year to share new research from academic staff, postgraduate researchers, and invited visiting speakers.

We have expertise across a range of periods and topics, in particular medieval and early modern dietary culture (including Shakespeare), early modern women’s health, mental health in the nineteenth century, contemporary ageing, ill-health and work in the twenty-first century.

 

 

The Health Humanities Research Group houses research across a range of periods, from the medieval era to the modern day. We focus on the significance of health and well-being in literature, drama, history, visual art, and modern culture, incorporating both traditional and modern theoretical approaches. Our research is on dietary culture in the medieval and early-modern period, including Shakespeare; women's physical health in the early-modern period; women's mental health in the nineteenth century; ageing in modernist and contemporary culture.

We are comprised of academics and Doctoral Researchers in English and other subject areas within the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, including history and visual culture.

Our members include:

We welcome new members and prospective PhD research projects that investigate all aspects of health humanities within our wide and diverse research specialisms.

Click here for PhD opportunities in Health Humanities. 

If you would like to contact us, please email the current Health Humanities lead Dr Joan Fitzpatrick 

Members are engaged in individual and collective research projects, which include:

'Help: Gender, Care, and Outsourcing in Contemporary Literature': Jennifer Cooke has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to examine how contemporary literature gives voice and narrative agency to the experiences of undervalued workers to whom we outsource care and domestic labour.

'Performing Old Age in the Contemporary': Siân Adiseshiah is working on a book that theorises the contemporary as a discursive formation with ageist exclusions, and analyses the performance of old age in contemporary culture, with particular attention to contemporary theatre.

'Receiving the Stranger in Shakespeare': Hospitality and Hostility in the Plays': Joan Fitzpatrick's monograph for Routledge provides critical analysis of the welcome and hostility shown to strangers of various kinds in Shakespeare’s plays.

'Authors and Alienists: Victorian Networks of Psychiatry': Anne-Marie Beller is working on a book on the nineteenth-century history of psychiatry.

Special Journal Issues include:

Siân Adiseshiah co-edited (with Amy Culley and Jonathon Shears) a special issue of the Journal of the British Academy: 'Narratives of Old Age and Gender: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives', vol. 11 (2023).

Joan Fitzpatrick edited a special issue of the Routledge journal Shakespeare on 'Health and Wellbeing in Shakespeare' (forthcoming in Spring 2025).

 

Recent publications from members of the Health Humanities group include:  

Jennifer Cooke's co-authored book chapter (with Demi Wilton) "Ageing, care, and women's work A world-systems feminist approach to Filipina literature" in Intersectional Feminist Research Methodologies co-edited with Line Nyhagen (Routledge, 2024), pp. 114-128.

Siân Adiseshiah's monograph Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre (Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury, 2023) -- shortlisted for the Theatre and Performance Research Association David Bradby Monography Prize 2023

Joan Fitzpatrick's journal articles: "The Merchant of Venice and the Demise of Hospitality" in Shakespeare vol. 18 (2022), pp. 24-45 and "Reimagining This Creature: Hospitality and Autohagiography in the Visions of Margery Kempe" in History: The Journal of the Historical Association vol. 106 (2021), pp. 561-577.

 Anne-Marie Beller's book chapter "Sensational Bodies: Representations of Race and Disability" in Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s, edited by Pamela K. Gilbert (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 36-56.

Claire O'Callaghan's journal article "She resolutely refuses to see a doctor": Re-reading Emily Brontë and Tuberculosis in 1848; Or Charlotte Brontë, Sickness and Correspondence" in Women’s Writing vol. 29 (2022), pp. 566–582 and her book chapter (with Sarah E. Fanning) "Bad or Mad? Branwell Brontë, Mental health, and Alcoholism in Sally Wainwright's To Walk Invisible" in Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Period Drama, edited by J. Taddeo, K. Byrne, and J. Leggott (Manchester University Press, 2022).

Victoria Browne's journal monograph Pregnancy Without Birth: A Feminist Philosophy of Miscarriage (Bloomsbury 2022) and her article "Browne V. A Pregnant Pause: Pregnancy, Miscarriage, and Suspended Time" in Hypatia vol. 37 (2022), pp. 447-468.

Emily Bell's journal article co-authored with Andrea Davidson "The Sick Body Writing: Towards an Affective Genetic Criticism" in Humanities vol. 13 (2024), pp. 1-14.

Special Journal Issues include:

Siân Adiseshiah co-edited (with Amy Culley and Jonathon Shears) a special issue of the Journal of the British Academy: 'Narratives of Old Age and Gender: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives', vol. 11 (2023).

Joan Fitzpatrick edited a special issue of the Routledge journal Shakespeare on 'Health and Wellbeing in Shakespeare' (forthcoming in Spring 2025).

Forthcoming Health Humanities Events will be listed here shortly.

Recent events organized or involving members of the Health Humanities Research Group include:

An Exhibition 'Health from Cradle to Grave: Birthing Chair to Death Couch' (Martin Hall Exhibition Space, Loughborough, 27 March -23 April 2024)

The Institute of Advanced Studies, Loughborough University, Annual interdisciplinary theme for 2022-23: 'Breathe' (co-led by Dr Joan Fitzpatrick)

Our exhibition: Health from Cradle to Grave: Birthing Chair to Death Couch.
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