The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities is a collection of thirty-six essays outlining a compelling new vision for medical humanities scholarship. In this talk, general editors Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods will discuss the different meanings and configurations of a critical medical humanities and what these open up for the future of this fast-growing field. They will be reflecting on contributors’ Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard’s notion of ‘experimental entanglement’. Their final focus will be on the challenges raised by interdisciplinary and cross-sector working. Such challenges are particularly evident in the context of large collaborative research projects and in contemporary doctoral training programmes.
Anne Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Theory at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She is the author of Trauma Fiction and Memory: New Critical Idiom, and co-editor, with Michael Rossington, of Theories of Memory and of Between the Psyche and the Polis: Refiguring History in Literature and Theory and, with Jonathan Long, of W. G. Sebald.
Angela Woods is Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities and Deputy Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. She is Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, a large interdisciplinary research project on voice-hearing (or auditory verbal hallucination) supported by the Wellcome Trust (2012-2020).
This lunchtime talk will take place at Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities, on Thursday 6 October in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD, at 1pm. The talk will last for approximately one hour, followed by refreshments, after which attendees are welcome to stay on for discussion. There is no need to register but seats will be available on a first come, first served basis.
A link to the contribution of Callard and Fitzgerald can be found here under ‘Resources’ – Chapter 1. Other chapters are also available to download.