Health Humanities Research Group

The Health Humanities Research Group houses research across a range of periods, from the medieval era to the modern day. The group is comprised of academics and Doctoral Researchers in English and other subject areas within the School of Social Sciences and Humanities. 

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.

The group organizes exhibitions, conferences, and other events that involve developing and enriching Health Humanities research in the UK and internationally.

Members of the group have received research funding from the AHRC, the British Academy, Leverhulme, and The Rosetrees Medical Trust. We have published widely within our own research specialisms but come together in this group to forge connections between the many and varied disciplinary strands that make for vibrant Health Humanities research. We continue to develop relationships with interested academic parties and public partners, both in the UK and internationally, most recently with Health Humanities researchers from Virginia Tech University in the USA.

Members of the group are listed below. For a selection of the wide range of research projects involving members of the Health Humanities Research Group see the 'Projects' section of this web page. Check out also the 'News and Events' section for information about our forthcoming British Academy Summer Showcase Exhibit: Materials of Pandemic Care Across Time (and a visit by our Vice Chancellor to the School of Social Sciences and Humanities to sample a treatment for plague and some early-modern biscuits).

Our members include:

• Professor Siân Adiseshiah - ageing and contemporary
• Dr Joan Fitzpatrick - medieval, early modern, and Shakespeare
• Dr Sara Read - early-modern women's health
• Dr Claire O'Callaghan - mental health in the nineteenth century
• Dr Anne-Marie Beller - mental health in the nineteenth century, Victorian lunatic asylums
• Dr Emily Bell - creativity and care in the James Joyce archive
• Dr Jade French - ageing, care, and modernism
• Dr Victoria Browne - the politics and philosophy of reproduction, care and vulnerability
• Dr Tamarin Norwood - bereavement studies and creativity, including drawing and life-writing
• Dr Rachael Grew - the monstrous body in art history and visual culture
• Hannah Palmer - maternal histories in the nineteenth century
• Catherine Rees - applied theatre and eating behaviour in care homes
• Claire Warden - health and wellbeing in Professional Wrestling
• Yee Zhao - aging in contemporary women's life writing

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

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

Members of the Health Humanities Research Group are engaged in individual and collective research projects, which include the following:

Siân Adiseshiah's current projects on older age, the contemporary, and performance develop from her convenorship of the British Academy conference ‘Narratives of Old Age and Gender’, which resulted in a special issue, 'Narratives of Old Age and Gender: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives', Journal of the British Academy 11.S2 (2023).

Within this she has an article, 'Old Age, Gender and Constructions of the Contemporary', where she theorises the contemporary as a discursive formation with ageist and gendered exclusions, and analyses the performance of old age in contemporary culture, with particular attention to contemporary theatre and film.

She is now developing two projects, a book expanding this theorisation to look more expansively at cultural conceptions of older age, performance, and the contemporary, and a collaborative multi-disciplinary project on age, ageism, and intergenerational encounters.

Anne-Marie Beller is working on a monograph, Authors and Alienists: Networks of Victorian Psychiatry. This book examines the relationships (both personal and professional) between mid-Victorian novelists and psychiatrists (known as Alienists or ‘mad-doctors’), and challenges prevailing paradigms by bringing into dialogue disparate strands of scholarship in the fields of Literary Studies and the History of Psychiatry. It contributes new knowledge about cultural negotiations of mental health in the nineteenth century and enhances our understanding of the diverse networks that shaped these discourses.

The second strand of the project is an AHRC grant application, ‘Mapping Madness: Authors, Alienists, Asylums’. Using digital technologies to map the networks between Victorian authors and alienists, we aim to represent these networks through visualisations and text to demonstrate the significant and extensive connections between novelists and the medical community in Britain during the Victorian period. Claire O’Callaghan (Loughborough) and Emily Bell (Leeds) are Project Co-Leads.

Victoria Browne is currently leading the Feminist Miscarriage Project, funded by an AHRC Curiosity Award. This two-year project will develop new understandings of miscarriage as a feminist social justice issue and build a 'full spectrum' model of support, solidarity and care, working with project partners including the Reproductive Justice Initiative, the Miscarriage Association and MSI Choices.

The project builds upon ideas developed in Victoria's 2022 book Pregnancy Without Birth: A Feminist Philosophy of Miscarriage. One article relating to this project has been published in Feminist Theory and another article is forthcoming in the Journal of Gender Studies.

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. The research focuses upon the representation of five figures who can be hired to help, from the beginnings of life until its end: the surrogate, nanny, cleaner, nurse, and the carer.

Care is a pressing societal concern with transnational implications, since many care roles are undertaken by migrant workers. This project offers timely arguments for revaluing outsourced care and domestic labour and for contemporary literature’s powerful attention to those workers upon whom we rely. It builds upon earlier work of Jennifer’s, published in her co-edited collection, Intersectional Feminist Research Methodologies. The result will be her third monograph.

Sara Read is editing Volume 3 of The Cultural History of Blood for Bloomsbury. Blood flows through bodies, seeps outwards, transmits information across generations, and is culturally coded in accordance with contemporary belief systems. The series is designed to be published as part of the Bloomsbury Cultural History Series, in six illustrated volumes, each devoted to an examination of blood in one of six historical periods.

Volume 3 covers the period 1400-1700. Sara is writing the Introduction and has also co-authored Chapter Six: 6 Magic, Ritual and Belief with Dr Jennifer Evans, Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Hertfordshire. The chapter covers blood rituals in Christianity in the post-Reformation era, its use as an apparent sign of guilt in witchcraft trials and its supposed magical and supernatural qualities, especially in relation to menstrual blood.

Joan Fitzpatrick is currently investigating the sensory impact of plague in the early modern period. Her sixth monograph Receiving the Stranger in Shakespeare: Hospitality and Hostility in the Plays is forthcoming with Routledge in the summer of 2025.

One spin-off article from this research (on the medieval religious radical, Margery Kempe) was published in 2021 in History, the journal of the Historical Association, and a second article (on early modern anti-Semitism) was published in 2022 in Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association. A third article (on nationalism, war and hunger) is forthcoming in July 2025 in Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge University Press). Also forthcoming this summer is her special issue of the Routledge journal Shakespeare on 'Health and Wellbeing in Shakespeare'. 

Hannah Palmer is working on her PhD thesis, ‘Abortion in Nineteenth-Century British Literature’.

Hannah’s thesis is a literary and cultural project which explores maternal and reproductive health in life writing, fiction, and medical records.

These materials include (but are not limited to) Elizabeth Gaskell’s correspondence, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2), Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia (1895), and unpublished patient case notes.

Catherine Rees is working on a project known as CURTAIN: Clinical Use of Reminiscence Theatre with older Adults in care to Improve Nutrition, which was funded by The Rosetrees Medical Trust.

This project builds upon applied theatre and clinical psychology to measure the impact of reminiscence theatre performance on nutrition in older adults in residential care homes. One article relating to this project has been published in the journal Appetite and another publication is forthcoming as a monograph to be published by Routledge.

Claire Warden works on the intersection of sport and art practice. Much of her current work focuses on the contemporary practice of professional wrestling, particularly ways to work with wrestlers, companies, schools and policy advisors on improving safety and wellbeing.

Articles relating to this project have been published in Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health and Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine. 

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 Summer 2025).

Members of the Health Humanities Research Group have been selected to curate an Exhibit at the 2025 British Academy Summer Showcase entitled: 'Materials of Pandemic Care Across Time'.

As part of a recent visit to the School of Humanities, the Vice-Chancellor sampled some early modern-biscuits (or 'jumbles') baked by Dr Sara Read following an original recipe.

The Vice-Chancellor also tried an early-modern plague remedy recreated by Dr Joan Fitzpatrick involving a sponge dipped in vinegar and applied to the nose.

In March 2025 Dr Sara Read delivered an online research seminar to the Health Humanities Research Group at Virginia Tech, USA. A successful creative writer as well as a scholar in early-modern reproductive health, Sara discussed the process by which case notes and midwifery practices in historical medical treatises are transformed into works of fiction. If you missed this seminar event, please check in here soon to access an in-conversation piece based on Sara's Virginia Tech talk.