We are delighted to announce that the NNMHR’s application for a Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award for the project “Thinking through things: object encounters in the medical humanities” has been successful.
“Thinking through things” has been developed by a team of ECRs from across the NNMHR: project PI, Dr Fiona Johnstone (Durham), and collaborators Dr Marie Allitt (Leeds), Dr Ashleigh Blackwood (Northumbria), Dr Bentley Crudgington (Manchester), Dr Ilaria Grando (York), Dr Katherine Rawling (Leeds), Olivia Turner (Newcastle), and Dr Jacqueline Waldock (Liverpool).
Asking what might be gained by ‘doing’ medical humanities through objects and images, the award will support an innovative programme of activities designed to stimulate interdisciplinary dialogue around the holdings of the Wellcome Collection. By bringing together ECRs and other professional participants, including creative practitioners and museums/archives staff, the Collection will be activated to appeal to a range of stakeholders beyond those who usually carry out archival work. By approaching selected objects in the Collection as ‘provocations to thought’ and ‘companions to our emotional lives’ (Turkle, 2011), the proposed activities will investigate how thinking and feeling ‘through things’ can generate new understandings of health.
Activities will centre around two workshops, the first at the Wellcome Collection in early 2020, and the second at Leeds/Durham in summer 2020. Outputs will include a series of linked podcasts, essays and interviews, showcasing the project’s findings; a Working Knowledge Project Short outlining best practice for ‘doing’ medical humanities with objects; and a sustainable network of collaborators for further projects. Additionally, the programme will support ECRs in acquiring the necessary skills for working with objects for research and engagement purposes, and will enable ECRs to form professional connections outside of the academy, laying the groundwork for future research, outreach, and engagement activities.
The NNMHR call for expressions of interest from ECRs to collaborate on the development of an exciting new project intended to support ECRs from across the Northern Network to engage creatively with the Wellcome Collection’s extensive holdings.
The chosen team will devise a programme of activities to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue around the Collection and support innovative modes of exploration and use, with a focus on research and public engagement. This programme will form the basis of an application for a Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award, for which the NNMHR has been invited to apply. The project will be led by Fiona Johnstone (Durham/ The Polyphony), with support from the NNMHR steering group, and the administrative assistance of Durham Institute for Medical Humanities. 4-6 ECRs will collaborate with Dr Johnstone on developing and co-writing the grant application, due August 31, and on delivering the resulting programme of activities and events.
How might the Collection be activated to appeal to a range of stakeholders beyond those who usually engage in archival work? For example, how might the Collection be made useful to those who work on very contemporary material or future-facing projects? How might it animate a more visually engaged critical medical humanities, and how might it be made more accessible to artists, activists, local organisations, and other non-traditional researchers?
The opportunity to be a collaborator on this grant application, and on the programme of events it will support, is open to postdoctoral ECRs affiliated to a NNMHR institution, from any discipline, who have research and/or engagement experience in the medical humanities. Successful candidates will need to be able to commit to working collaboratively on the bid over July and early August 2019 (this is likely to include attending a working group in Durham on 15thJuly), and then supporting the project from 2019-2020, should funding be awarded. Limited funding will be available to support in-person meetings of the project team.
This is a career enrichment opportunity intended to allow postdoctoral researchers to gain valuable experience at collaborative grant writing within a well-supported environment, and to be named as co-collaborators on a Wellcome Trust Grant. If the bid is successful, the project will give you the chance to influence the way in which the Wellcome Collection thinks about its holdings, and to make your mark on research activities across the NNMHR. It will offer significant networking opportunities, and the experience of working as part of an interdisciplinary team, devising and delivering a meaningful programme of academic events on time and to budget.
Finally, the project will enhance your own engagement with the Wellcome Collection’s holdings, and provide occasion for you to consider how the Collection might enrich your own research (e.g. by providing a previously unthought of archival dimension to future or current projects, or by suggesting avenues for communicating and collaborating with non-academic audiences and stakeholders).
If the bid is successful, there will be additional opportunities for other researchers to engage with this project beyond the grant writing stage, by contributing to the workshops and other events.
The closing date for expressions of interest was midnight on Sunday 30thJune 2019.
Title of project:
Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind: Investigating Disorders of Self
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Dr Ulrika Maude, University of Bristol
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
Dr Elizabeth Barry, University of Warwick
Dr Laura Salisbury, University of Exeter
Funding sources:
The AHRC
Summary of research:
‘Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind’ is an interdisciplinary network that uses the radical insights of aesthetic modernism to develop dialogue with medical practice in psychiatry, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, neurology, and old age psychiatry. The project is dynamically interdisciplinary, fostering collaboration between researchers and clinicians working in Higher Education, the NHS, and international healthcare. It brings literary and arts scholars, philosophers, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, neuropsychologists, neurologists, and doctors in palliative care into dialogue with theatre practitioners, dancers and artists from across the UK, Europe and the USA, asking them to explore together the resources modernism offers for creatively understanding experiences of body and mind poorly served by realist models of the self.
The project explores the historical and discursive links between literary modernism, medical discoveries, and clinical practice. Underpinning the project is the significance of phenomenology and the first-person experience of medicine. The project considers modernism’s specific ability to speak to seemingly unruly mental and embodied states, and the conceptual ‘black hole’ of extreme old age, using performance-as-research strategies to consider how theatre and dance might help scholars and clinicians understand these states via experiential means. It also explores the role of the visual arts in communicating experiences that resist conceptual definition.
Project website/webpage:
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/projects/modernism-medicine-and-the-embodied-mind-investigating-disorders-of-the-self/
Anticipated time frame of project:
March 2015 to July 2016
Anticipated audiences:
Humanities and arts scholars and students, clinicians, healthcare practitioners, medical students
Tagged as:
Modernism, medicine, psychiatry, ageing, neurology
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Title of project:
Artatomy
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Rachael Allen, visual artist and researcher
Dr Iain Keenan, Newcastle University
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
N/A
Funding sources:
Newcastle Institute of Creative Arts Practice Award 2014
Summary of research:
Funded by Newcastle Institute of Creative Arts Practice Award 2014 as part of the transdisciplinary project ‘Student partner approaches for strategic design and evaluation of artistic modelling as a teaching and learning method in anatomy education’, Artatomy hosted two exhibitions at the University’s Students Union and International Centre for Life in collaboration with Dr Iain Keenan, Rachael Allen (visual artist and researcher) and undergraduate medical students. Artatomy brings the art of anatomy as explored by Newcastle undergraduate medical and biomedical students and focuses on learning and reflection through creativity, expression and imagination, where the students were invited to engage with the broader aesthetics, ethics and sensorial experience of anatomy.
“Giving them the chance to explore their creative side on their own terms, Artatomy has helped them re-connect with the process of drawing that they may not be using much in their studies or in their day to day life – and in some cases haven’t used since they were at school. The artwork they’ve produced is rich in imagination, skill and expression, and is indicative of the true potential and value of art when students are given the choice to explore and participate.” (Rachael Allen)
Project website/webpage:
http://www.life.org.uk/whats-on/artatomy#.VazlE_nbhjs
https://twitter.com/artatomy
Anticipated time frame of project:
2014-2015
Anticipated audiences:
Medical educators, medical students, artists
Tagged as:
Anatomy, medical education, visual arts
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Title of project:
Lessons in Anatomy: Dissecting medicine and health through visual and literary arts
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Rachael Allen, visual artist and researcher
Dr Eleanor Holmes, GP, clinical educator and writer – pen name Eliot North
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
N/A
Funding sources:
a-n New Collaboration Bursary
Summary of research:
Rachael Allen joined forces with Dr Eleanor Holmes to investigate the creative potential for collaborative engagement across the visual and literary arts through the exchange of experiences as artist and writer, whilst exploring the interface between medicine, health, the arts and humanities. The bursary subsidised valuable time exploring each other’s creative disciplines and methodologies – drawing, sculpture, creative writing and teaching – and specific research interests – anatomy, pathophysiology, medical education, clinical practice and bioethics – to inspire new ideas for joint visual and literary outcomes.
“We met as strangers from very different worlds (medicine and art) with contrasting backgrounds and experiences (doctor and patient) but found common languages with which to negotiate our beliefs and perspectives on human health, morbidity and mortality. The collaboration created an intimate space for us to share our own narratives, life stories and emotions that surfaced through our interactions. We are now friends. Our unfolding conversations drive our ongoing ‘Lessons in Anatomy’, illuminating not only the relationship between the arts and medicine but also the fine line separating the dead and the living, doctor and patient, health and illness, as well as the relationship between two women with very different views and experiences of mortality.”
Project website/webpage:
http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/4000721
Anticipated time frame of project:
November 2013 – July 2014
Anticipated audiences:
Medical Humanities scholars, visual artists, writers, General Practitioners
Would be interested in hearing from…
All interest in the project welcome – comments, contributions, research suggestions, funding opportunities.
Tagged as:
Creative arts, collaboration, anatomy, pathology, medical education
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Title of project:
Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture c. 1660-1832
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Professor Clark Lawlor, Northumbria University
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
Dr Jonathan Andrews, Newcastle University
Professor Allan Ingram, Northumbria University
Dr Leigh Wetherall Dickson, Northumbria University
Dr James Kennaway, Newcastle University
Dr Anita O’Connell, Northumbria University
Funding sources:
The Leverhulme Trust
Summary of research:
In the eighteenth century, as well as our own, certain diseases could be construed as endowing a sick person with some social or cultural cachet popularly associated with the illness. Melancholy could lend an air of creativity, gout could indicate class and wealth, and nerves could suggest a fashionable sensibility. A slight illness and enough wealth to travel could lead one to the spas and seaside resorts that, outside of London, formed the centres of fashionable society, or perhaps even lead abroad for warmer climes. As such, fashionable diseases also became the object of stigma, satire and allegations of fakery. They could be linked to the putative artificiality of ‘manners,’ modishness and the posturing of the beau monde. As Alexander Pope’s poetic satire says of women in the ‘Cave of Spleen,’ ‘The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new night-dress gives a new disease.’ Yet while social discourses might define it as such, the afflicted might not find the experience of such diseases fashionable at all, but rather a reality of painful suffering.
The ‘Fashionable Diseases’ project interrogates the meanings of the word ‘fashionable’ when applied to disease, and particularly explores the ways in which the medicine, literature and culture of the eighteenth century define and represent often debilitating diseases as fashionable. It seeks to discover how labels alter our conceptions of disease and provide narratives that may be at variance with actual patient experience, or that might even construct that experience. We are especially interested in the role of literary writing in this ‘construction’ of a template for the experience of disease by sufferers. Our research aims to explore the differing discourses and representations of illnesses in the long eighteenth century to deliver a better understanding of the fashionability of disease in our own time.
Project website/webpage:
http://fashionablediseases.info
Anticipated time frame of project:
May 2013 – May 2016
Anticipated audiences:
Academic: literature, history, art, music, psychology, medical history, medicine; Non-academic: those interested in history of ideas and eighteenth-century history
Would be interested in hearing from…
Anyone wishing to collaborate, participate in workshops, come along to our events or anyone with similar interests. Please do get in touch.
Tagged as:
fashion, disease, eighteenth century, sensibility, sociability
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Title of project:
Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Dr. Gavin Miller, University of Glasgow
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
n/a
Funding sources:
The Wellcome Trust (Seed Award)
Summary of research:
The project investigates the significance of science fiction for the medical humanities, and is intended to pathfind for a future, large-scale research project.
Science fiction isn’t confined to novels, short stories, and cinema; it also gives us a style and substance for our visions of medical progress. This project doesn’t investigate only the familiar genre elements of narrative fiction, cinema and TV. It also explores the so-called ‘technoscientific imaginary’, and its imagining of future possibilities enabled by biomedical progress.
The project’s activities include:
A series of themed workshops, and a concluding conference, consolidating a network of interested researchers, clinicians, and writers.
An online database of primary and secondary resources to aid future research.
A themed special issue of BMJ Medical Humanities on ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’
A creative writing competition, with successful entrants appearing in a competition anthology.
Project website/webpage:
http://scifimedhums.glasgow.ac.uk
Anticipated time frame of project:
September 2015 to August 2016
Anticipated audiences:
Those involved in the medical humanities, literary studies, bioethics, science studies and film studies.
Would be interested in hearing from…
Academics, clinicians, creative writers
Tagged as:
science fiction, technoscience
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Title of project:
Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Professor Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
Professor Chris Lintott, University of Oxford
Professor Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester
Julie Harvey, Natural History Museum
Paul Cooper, Natural History Museum
Dr John Tweddle, Natural History Museum
Dr Sam Alberti, Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons
Thalia Knight, Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons
Keith Moore, the Royal Society
Names and institutions of postdoctoral research assistants:
Dr Sally Frampton, University of Oxford
Dr Geoffrey Belknap, University of Leicester
Dr Berris Charnley, University of Oxford
Dr Jim O’Donnell, University of Oxford
Names and institutions of PhD students:
Alison Moulds, University of Oxford
Matthew Wale, University of Leicester
Funding sources:
The AHRC
Summary of research:
This project brings together historical and literary research in the nineteenth century with twenty-first century scientific practice, looking at the ways in which patterns of popular communication and engagement in nineteenth-century science can offer models for current practice. It is based at the Universities of Oxford and Leicester, in partnership with the Natural History Museum, the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Royal Society. Researchers are drawing on these institutions’ historical collections, particularly science and medical journals of the nineteenth century. They also work with their scientific communities, addressing questions about the creation and circulation of knowledge in the digital age, and looking at innovative ways of breaking through the public/professional divide.
Project website/webpage:
http://conscicom.org/
Anticipated time frame of project:
3 years (December 2013- December 2017)
Anticipated audiences:
Historians of Science and Medicine, Cultural and Literary Historians of the Nineteenth Century, Scientific and Medical Professionals, Citizen Scientists and Patients
Tagged as:
Medical Humanities, History of Science, History of Medicine, Journals, Interdisciplinarity, Interdisciplinary Research
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Title of project:
Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth Century Perspectives
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Professor Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford
Names and institutions of co investigators/collaborators:
Dr Amelia Bonea, University of Oxford
Dr Melissa Dickson, University of Oxford
Dr Jennifer Wallis, University of Oxford
Funding sources:
This project is supported by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme under Grant Agreement Number 340121
Summary of research:
This project explores medical, literary and cultural responses to perceived problems of stress and overwork in the Victorian age, anticipating many of the preoccupations of our own era. Particular areas of focus include: diseases of finance and speculation, diseases associated with particular professions, alcohol and drug addiction, travel for health, education and over-pressure in the classroom, the development of phobias and nervous disorders, and the imaginative construction of utopias and dystopias. The project aims to break through the compartmentalization of psychiatric, environmental, and literary history, and to offer new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century.
Project website/webpage:
http://diseasesofmodernlife.org/
Anticipated time frame of project:
5 years (2014-2019)
Anticipated audiences:
Historians of Medicine, Historians of Science and Technology, Cultural and Literary Historians of the Nineteenth-Century
Tagged as:
Overpressure, Stress, Nerves, Medical Humanities, Interdisciplinarity, Interdisciplinary Research
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Title of project:
Centre for Medical Humanities New Generations
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Professor Jane Macnaughton, Durham University
Names and institutions of co investigators/collaborators:
Northern Network Steering Group:
Dr Bethan Evans, University of Liverpool
Dr Alice Hall, University of York
Dr Gavin Miller, University of Glasgow
Professor Stuart Murray, University of Leeds
Professor Ian Sabroe, University of Sheffield
Dr Anne Whitehead, Newcastle University
Dr Angela Woods, Newcastle University
Kings College Centre for Humanities and Health
Colleagues at the Wellcome Trust
Funding sources:
The AHRC
Summary of research:
Durham University’s Centre for Medical Humanities, in collaboration with the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research and the Wellcome Trust has set up the New Generations Programme to address an issue surfacing in the medical humanities. Emerging humanities researchers are increasingly engaging with interdisciplinary research but lack contexts in which to learn about and experience how it is done. Supported by a Collaborative Skills Development grant from the AHRC, this unique programme aims to deliver an exciting and innovative skills development package to a group of doctoral students and early career researchers in the medical humanities while facilitating the development of a supportive, interdisciplinary peer group. Additionally, the programme will create career development opportunities by enabling interaction between participants and staff in key centres of the medical humanities while engaging in discussions on the full range of medical humanities career options.
Project website/webpage:
https://www.dur.ac.uk/cmh/newgenerations/
Anticipated time frame of project:
August 2014 – September 2015
Anticipated audiences:
Medical humanities researchers, medical humanities academics
Tagged as:
medical humanities, interdisciplinary research, skills development, career development, early career researchers, doctoral students
Interested in hearing from:
Medical humanities institutions and centres
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