International Health Humanities Network Membership

Professor Susan Hogan has research interests in the history of medicine. She has written extensively on the relationship between the arts, insanity, and the role of the arts in rehabilitation. She is also very interested in the treatment of women within psychiatry and maternity care. Her most recent work is ESRC funded work, in collaboration with the University of Sheffield, Department of Sociological Studies, which is looking at representions of older women. The aim of this study is to use the creative arts to negotiate and challenge images of ageing and explore their contribution to participatory approaches to research in social gerontology.

Susan Hogan has a BA Degree in fine art, a post-graduate diploma in art therapy, a Master’s Degree in Arts Administration (Arts Policy & Management), and a further Master’s Degree in Social Science Research Methods (Social Policy & Sociology). Her Ph.D. was in Cultural History (looking at the history of ideas around madness and the use of the arts) from Aberdeen University, Scotland. Susan has also undertaken further training in group-analytic psychotherapy.

She served for six years as a Health Professions Council (U.K.) ‘visitor’. She is a former Vice-President of ANATA (Australian National Art Therapy Association, now ANZATA), and has twice served as a regional co-ordinator for the British Association of Art Therapists (BAAT). She has been instrumental in setting up several art therapy training courses.

Professor Hogan qualified as an art therapist in 1985. She has a particular interest in group-work and experiential learning, following early employment with Peter Edwards M.D., an exceptional psychiatrist who had worked with Maxwell Jones, a psychiatrist who is associated with the ‘therapeutic community movement’ in Britain. She is currently Professor in Cultural Studies & Art Therapy at the University of Derby, where she, for many years, facilitated experiential workshops and the closed-group component of the art therapy training. This training is based on the group-interactive approach described by Professor Diane Waller). Now most of her time is spent supervising research at MA & PhD levels, and conducting research.

Susan has also undertaken work with pregnant women and women who have recently given birth, offering art therapy groups to give support to women, and an opportunity for them to explore their changed sense of self-identity and sexuality as a result of pregnancy and motherhood. She has published extensively on this subject.

Susan Hogan has worked in academia since 1990 for a number of institutions, including The University of New South Wales, The University of Technology, Sydney, Macquarie University and the National Art School, Sydney.

Professor Hogan’s major intellectual work is Healing Arts: The History of Art Therapy (2001), described by the late Professor of Psychiatry, Roy Porter, as: ‘sure to be the definitive monograph on this subject for the foreseeable future’. Her other books comprise, Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy (as editor, 1997); Gender Issues in Art Therapy (as editor, 2003); Conception Diary: Thinking About Pregnancy & Motherhood (2006), and Revisiting Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy (as editor, 2012). She is currently co-writing on women’s experience of ageing with sociologists from the University of Sheffield. Additional to all the above, she has also published a number of both scholarly and polemical papers on women and theories of insanity.

Particularly influenced by the anthropological work of her late mother-in-law, Dame Professor Mary Douglas, Hogan’s work has been innovative in its application of social anthropological and sociological ideas to art therapy and her unwavering challenge to reductive psychological theorising.

Kate is a Senior Research Fellow in the News & Media Research Centre, School of Arts & Communication, at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for the project ‘Mediating Mental Health: An Integrated Approach to Investigating Media and Social Actors’. The project is located in the context of communication and media studies and cultural studies of psychiatry and draws upon concepts of biocommunicability and mediatisation and methods of discourse and thematic analysis to investigate factors shaping mental health news, the media-oriented practices of actors in the mental health field, and the ways in which media representations impact people’s views and experiences of mental distress.

Kate has a PhD in Communication and has undertaken qualitative research examining media framing and public understandings of a range of health issues, including obesity, alcohol and pregnancy and infectious diseases. Kate’s research is multidisciplinary, incorporating sociology, media and communication, cultural studies, mad and disability studies. Kate is also Vice-Chair of the Health Communication and Change working group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).

I am Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham.

My research focuses on the British countryside in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially rural health histories, rural communities, agricultural workers, knowledge networks, and the relationship between town and country.

My first monograph: Communities in Contrast: Doncaster and its Rural Hinterland, c. 1830-1830 (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2019) included chapters on living and working conditions and the relationship between town and country (https://www.herts.ac.uk/uhpress/books-content/communities-in-contrast)

I am now working towards my second monograph: Farming, Psychiatry and Rural Society: Asylum and Hospital Farms (Routledge, 2022). in addition, my work on rural health histories considers the notion of a healthy countryside and mental ill health in the countryside. I am particularly interested in pursuing interdisciplinary links and the contemporary relevance of rural health histories, working with other sectors including museums, health, farming, and county councils. 

I have also undertaken pedagogical research, including the uses of history in community education, the relationship between cultural stimuli and mental health and wellbeing, and the role of place and space in Adult Education. I continue to engage in pedagogical research, exploring subject specific initiatives including assessment, diversity and inclusivity, and health and wellbeing. I am on the Steering Committee of the East Midlands Centre for History Learning and Teaching, and I am the Chair of History Lab Plus (a national organisation that supports early career historians) and Secretary of the British Agricultural History Society. I have a PGCert in Teaching and Learning in HIgher Education and am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

I am currently a part-time PhD student in the English Literature department at Exeter University, working on the demonising representations of psychiatrists (psychoanlaysts and psychotherapists) in modern English and American fiction.

I have a long history of being a psychiatric patient, my first hospital admission having been in 1971.  Many of my service-user experiences have been negative.  However,  I have also benefited greatly from psychotherapy over a long period and am now well enough to study again.

I am a UK qualified Physiotherapist (1997) now residing in Auckland, New Zealand. In December 2011 I completed a PGDip in Health Science (Rehabilitation) which has opened-up a whole new way of looking at my profession, myself and how those two combine in my projected life map. Having come to my post-grad studies well and truly ensconsed in 'scientific method' I feel like a whole new world of exploration lies ahead.  To this end I am in the process of applying to undertake an MPhil, through Auckland University of Technology, and hopefully later take this on to a PhD.  My area of interest lies around the musculoskeltal physiotherapy practice that I have been involved heavily with since 2000, and in particular in what limits our scope of practice. I intend to use a Foucaudian discourse analysis to explore this in the first instance.

Frank Houghton is a Public Health Geographer at Limerick Institute of Technology in Ireland. He is Director of the HEALR Research Group and has particular interests in tobacco control, therapeutic landscapes, predatory publishing, and leprosy. He has worked in State Health & Social Services in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. He has worked in academia in the UK, Ireland and the USA.

Prof of Narrative Medicine Trinity College Dublin

Researcher and Teacher of narrative to undergrads and postgrads

MD TCD

FRCGP FRCPI 

Masters in Medical Humanities U Sydney 

Medical graduate TCD

Specialist in General Practice and Occupational medicine

Recent graduate Masters in Medical Humanities USydney

Medical journalist

Curator of DotMED annual conference

Honorary lecturer narrative medicine National University of Ireland Galway

Sara Houston is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Dance at University of Roehampton.  Her area of specialism is in community dance, in particular concentrating on dance for socially marginalised groups, including prisoners and specific groups of older people.  In 2011 she won the Bupa Foundation Vitality for Life Prize for her work examining the effects and experience of dancing for people with Parkinson's.  Sara is working with English National Ballet until 2015 leading a mixed-methods (ethnographic and bio-mechanic) research project focusing on English National Ballet's Dance for Parkinson's group.  Sara has published articles in the leading academic dance journals and in edited collections.  She is Chair of the Board of Directors and Trustees of the Foundation for Community Dance. 

Rong Huang is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Health Humanities at Peking University in China, where she works on the intertwining between life writing and medical humanities.

She holds an M.A. in English Language and Literature and a Ph.D. in Comparative and World Literature from Peking University. Her research interests include autobiographical narratives, theories of the body, and media studies. She has published articles on life writing, world literature, and new media.