ECR Fellowships
Introducing the recipients of the 2021/2022 NNMHR ECR Fellowships:
Winter 2021/2022 Fellows
Katie Salmon – University of Newcastle
Project Title: ‘Perpetual crisis, affect and mental health in contemporary Chilean and Spanish culture’
Fellowship Period: 1 December 2021 – 25 February 2022
Katie recently completed her PhD in Spanish and Latin American studies at Newcastle University. Her interdisciplinary, transnational thesis applied affect theory to a corpus of contemporary Chilean and Spanish comics, films and novels that uncover the micro-level impact of societal crises on the mental health of Generation Y. It revealed how crises have exacerbated neoliberalism’s inherent psychological pressures, as well as the residual strains of the Pinochet and Francoist dictatorships.
Katie will use the NNMHR ECR Fellowship to develop these findings into a book proposal. She will also prepare a funding application to extend her project to the post-pandemic crisis landscape.
Christine Slobogin – University of Manchester
Project title: ‘Queering the Surgical Ward: Gender Fluidity and Dickie Orpen’s Cartoon Alter Egos’
Christine Slobogin is an art historian working within the medical humanities. Her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London focused on Dickie Orpen’s surgical drawings and the visual culture of plastic surgery in Second World War Britain. This fellowship will fund a new chapter in the forthcoming monograph that examines how gender fluidity was depicted and utilized by Orpen within the hierarchies of the hospital. Christine’s research on empathy and plastic surgery photographs and drawings has been published in Medical Humanities and she has a chapter forthcoming in an edited volume published by Bloomsbury on British humour during the Second World War.
Find her on Twitter: @slobogin
Joe Wood – University of Glasgow
Project Title: Cicely Saunders and the Literary and Cultural Heritage of ‘Total Pain’
Fellowship Period: January – February 2022
Joe is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in professional and personal discourses around holism in medicine and care, with particular attention to dying, death, grief and pain. He is currently an ECR rep on the Glasgow Medical Humanities Network Steering Group and a Research Associate at St Christopher’s Hospice, London.
His PhD project, completed in September 2021, examined the contemporary legacies of the idea of ‘total pain’ as used by the hospice pioneer Cicely Saunders. Joe will use his fellowship to write an article exploring the range of literary and philosophical texts that led Saunders to conceive of ‘total pain’.
Spring / Summer 2021 Fellows
Dunja Begović, University of Manchester
Project Title: ‘Looking into the womb: Ethical implications of increased access to the fetus and evolving views of parental responsibility’
Fellowship Period: 1st April – 30th June 2021
Dunja is currently completing a PhD in Bioethics and Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Manchester. Her thesis looks at the ethical challenges to pregnant women’s autonomy that arise in the context of new reproductive technologies and practices, such as routine prenatal testing for disability, innovative maternal-fetal surgery and gestational surrogacy. Previously to her PhD she received an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and a master’s degree in philosophy from Aarhus University, Denmark.
Dr Lucia Brandi, University of Liverpool
Project Title: ‘Language, power and wellbeing: decolonising research praxis to identify barriers to indigenous language-use in healthcare, and cultural mechanisms to support wellbeing’
Fellowship Period: 29th April – 16th June 2021
Lucia Brandi is a sociolinguist and Latin Americanist. She is currently PDRA for AHRC research on memory, victims and representation of the Colombian conflict at the University of Liverpool. Lucia has previously worked with NGOs in Nicaragua, and won the 2019 AHGBI publication prize for her doctoral research on language and public services in Mexico. Her book Tutunakú: Language, Power, and Youth in Central Mexico is forthcoming from Legenda. During this NNMHR ECR Fellowship, Lucia is developing a project of participatory research into wellbeing and indigenous-language use in healthcare.
Dr Peder Clark, University of Liverpool
Project Title: ‘‘The Effects Can Last Forever’: Ecstasy’s Risks and Pleasures, 1985-2000’
Fellowship Period: April – June 2021
Dr Peder Clark is a historian of modern Britain with research interests in health, citizenship, everyday life, visual culture, and most recently, drugs and subcultures. His project ‘The Effects Can Last Forever’: Ecstasy’s Risks and Pleasures, 1985-2000 looks at the health, social and cultural impact of the drug Ecstasy (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine or MDMA) on Britain, from its arrival in the mid-1980s as a ‘novel’ psychoactive substance to its adoption as a mass intoxicant by youth culture by the turn of the millennium. He will use the Fellowship to complete a journal article on gendered intoxication, and to develop a funding application.
Dr Natalie Goodison, Durham University
Project Title: ‘Black Bodies, Disability, and Transformation in the Middle Ages’
Fellowship Period: 1st June – 30th July 2021
Natalie is a medieval scholar with a research specialism in embodiment. Her project as an NNMHR Fellow will examine a series of medieval texts where black bodies transform to white upon conversion to the Christian faith. In some medieval texts, these bodies are not merely black but are also gruesomely disfigured. She is analysing this motif because disability and race seemingly are derived from the same root causes. Is race therefore an acquired characteristic or inherited? This project also considers the conflation between racial difference and disability. For example, is transformation—from both disability and race—an essential component for salvation in these texts? Such a study is important because the link between blackness and disability contributes to diachronic analysis of each discourse.
Dr Anna Jamieson, Durham University
Project Title: ‘Crazy in Love: Materializing Madness in the Late Eighteenth-Century’
Fellowship Period: 16th August – 26th September 2021
Anna Jamieson is an interdisciplinary early career researcher specialising in visual and material cultures of the late eighteenth century. Awarded her PhD in cultural, social and institutional responses to female insanity from Birkbeck, University of London, in 2020, she is currently a Birkbeck Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Researcher, working on women’s mental illness, eighteenth-century private madhouses and asylum tourism. She is also an associate editor at The Polyphony and hosts the podcast, Coping in Confinement, which explores women’s responses to confinement, past and present.
Dr Louisa Hann, University of Manchester
Project title: ‘The Political Economy of Contemporary HIV/AIDS Theatre: Activism, Community, and Theatre as an Institution’
Fellowship period: June – September
Louisa Hann is an early career researcher and freelance writer who was recently awarded a PhD from the University of Manchester for a thesis examining contemporary HIV/AIDS theatre. She is interested in how the medical humanities intersect with questions of political economy, and has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. Louisa will use the NNMHR Fellowship as an opportunity to develop a book proposal based on her PhD thesis.
Dr Fiona Johnstone, Durham University
Project Title: ‘“Critical Interlopers”: contemporary artists as collaborators in the medical humanities’
Fellowship Period: April – October 2021
Fiona Johnstone is an art historian, specialising in the intersections between art history and medical humanities. She is the author of AIDS & Representation (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and editor of the collected volume Anti-Portraiture (Bloomsbury, 2020). Fiona was PI for the Wellcome-funded project “Thinking Through Things”, which engaged with and expanded the visual and material turn in the medical humanities, and is also an Associate Editor for The Polyphony.
This fellowship will allow Fiona to build on her recent research exploring the role of contemporary artists as critical collaborators in health and medicine. She will work on two articles: 1) “Critical Interlopers: artists as research collaborators in the medical humanities”, and 2) in collaboration with Dr Diana Beljaars, a paper on the artist Liz Atkin, whose work engages with the medical phenomenon of dermatillomania (skin-picking).
Fiona will co-convene a session on “Contemporary Art, Health and Medicine” at the Association for Art History Annual Conference in April 2021; this will be followed by an online seminar series that will run from May to October 2021.
Dr Susan Notess, Durham University
Project Title: ‘The Value of Listening’
Fellowship Period: 1st April – 31st May 2021
Susan completed her PhD in Philosophy at Durham University, writing about conversational ethics and what it means to listen to someone. As a fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities, she is adapting her PhD work for application in the medical context. What does it mean to listen to a patient in a clinical encounter? What do we owe to each other as listeners in the context of medical care? Answers to these questions and more are forthcoming this summer, thanks to generous funding from the IMH. She previously trained as a linguist at Indiana University. Being originally from Fort Collins, Colorado, she particularly enjoys the novelty of living right by the Tynemouth seaside!
Personal website: https://susannotess.wordpress.com/
Dr Monica O’Brien, University of Glasgow
Project Title: ‘Emotions and control: Physicians and governments managing the French pox in Germany, 1495-1700’
Fellowship Period: 1st April – 30th June 2021
Monica O’Brien’s NNMHR Early Career Fellowship project investigates the social, emotional, and medical histories of the French pox (syphilis) in Germany from 1495 to 1700, on which she is writing two publications. One will examine how the city governments of Frankfurt and Nuremberg managed the pox during its early years (1495-1510). Her other publication will explore medical practitioners’ emotional responses to this disease and its victims. Monica received her PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2019. The same year, she won the McCarthy Award for History of Medicine Research (RCPE) for her research on French pox specialists in Germany.
Dr Owen Rees, Manchester Metropolitan University
Project Title: ‘The Veteran in Classical Greece’
Fellowship Period: 1st May – 1st August 2021
Owen Rees is Associate Lecturer of Ancient History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He specialises in classical Greek socio-military history, and the use of ancient history in the study of modern psychology. He is also the founder and lead editor of the website BadAncient.com, a website that fact-checks common claims made about the ancient world and exposes prevalent pseudo-history in the modern day. Owen’s current research examines the experiences of war veterans in classical Greece, with a particular interest in the physical and psychological consequences of their military service.
Dr Emily Kate Timms, University of Leeds
Project Title: ‘Reimagining Intergenerational Health Solidarities: Anti-racism, Care, and Dementia, 1980-Present’
Fellowship Period: 5th April – 30th September 2021
Emily has recently passed her PhD viva at the School of English, University of Leeds. Her thesis, ‘Postcolonial Representations of Age and Ageing in Aotearoa New Zealand and Caribbean Texts’, examines the intersections between postcolonial studies and the cognate fields of age studies, critical gerontology, and dementia studies.
She is delighted to join the NNMHR ECR Fellow scheme. She will be developing her new postdoctoral project ‘Reimagining Intergenerational Health Solidarities: Anti-racism, Care, and Dementia, 1980-Present’. She hopes to explore the intersections of structural and cultural ageism and racism and their links to cultural and material intergenerational health inequalities.