International Health Humanities Network Membership

Josephine Bardi is a UK registered Mental Health Nursr with an MSc in Public Health. She is a recipient of the 2015 ESRC DTC studentship in Mental Health and Wellbeing at the University of Nottingham. Josephine is keen on qualitative research, mixed method research methods, systematic review, health promotion and community development.

I have recently gained much interest of healthcare research. I want to like healthcare research with traditional humanities.

Teaching fellow and researcher, UCL China Centre for Health and Humanity, University College London.

Heike Bartel is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Nottingham (since 2000) with a strong interest in representation of mental health issues in literature and culture. Her work has a strong comparative and interdisciplinary angle.

She has published widely on the mythical figure of Medea, the infamous infanticidal mother, and on representations of 'mad' ('black') mothers in literature and culture.

She is currently working on a project entitled 'Hungry for Words' researching the interrelationship between food, culture, power and language. She is coordinator of an interdisciplinary working group that engages with male anorexia and is looking to establish a wider network on this theme. Her contact details and list of publication can be found on the website of the University of Nottingham (go to Department of German > staff > Bartel).  

Creative Director of Foundation for Community Dance.

Foundation for Community Dance is the professional organisation for anyone involved in creating opportunities for people to experience and participate in dance.

The benefits of dance to a person's health and wellbeing have been recognised within community dance for many years. www.communitydance.org.uk/health is a growing and developing knowledge bank for you about many aspects of dance and the contribution it makes to health education, health care, teaching new ways to live, managing illness, and community development. In the light of the increased interest and profile of dance approaches to supporting people with Parkinson's Disease and dementia, we have included specific sections that recognise the growing interest in these fields. It is our intention as work in other clinical areas is developed to profile those areas as well.

Anne Basting (Ph.D.) is an educator, scholar, and artist whose work focuses on the potential for the arts and humanities to improve our quality of life as communities and individuals. For over 15 years, Basting has developed and researched methods for embedding the arts into long-term care, with a particular focus on people with cognitive disabilities like dementia. Basting is author of numerous articles and two books, Forget Memory: Creating better lives for people with dementia (2009) and The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture. Basting is the recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Brookdale National Fellowship, and numerous major grants. She is author and/or producer of nearly a dozen plays and public performances, including Finding Penelope (2011), a play inspired by a year of intergenerational conversations about the myth of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, and professionally staged throughout Luther Manor, a long term care facility in Wisconsin.

     Basting holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Arts from the University of Minnesota, and a Masters in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin. She founded and directs the award-winning TimeSlips Creative Storytelling, which replaces the pressure to remember with the freedom of imagination for people with memory loss. TimeSlips’ interactive website (timeslips.org), features a prompt library of over 100 images and questions, and bringing creative engagement to elders and their families wherever they live. 

     Basting gives keynote addresses across the world on the power and potential of creative engagement.  Basting was Founding Director of UWM's Center on Age and Community from 2003 to 2013, where she fostered partnerships between scholars, students, and service providers, and translated applied research into innovative educational tools including manuals, films, and social media.  In 2013, Basting returned to the Department of Theatre to focus on integrating her research and creative practice into teaching. Her teaching focus includes Performing Community, Playwriting, Storytelling, Play Analysis, and Creative Engagement in Health Settings.  She is working toward a moment when the arts are an integral element in our care systems.

     Currently, Basting is co-editing the book Playing Penelope, due out from University of Iowa Press in 2016, and co-writing and directing Slightly Bigger Women, a play inspired by the question - what has changed since Little Women's Jo March dared to dream of becoming a writer?  And what still needs to change?  She continues to facilitate and grow The Creative Trust Milwaukee, an alliance to foster life-long learning through the arts.  She lives in Milwaukee with husband Brad Lichtenstein and their two rambunctious boys Ben and Will.

Arindam Basu is a medical doctor, epidemiologkst, and a Senior Lecturer in Helath Sciences at the School of health sciences. He teaches Environmental health and epidemiology. Arin's research areas are in gene-environmental interactions and health services research.

I am an ambitious, first-year graduate student currently enrolled in an M.A. program in Literature Medicine and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  I have a B.A. in Psychology with a second major in Comparative Literature and a minor in Creative Writing also from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Currently, I'm exploring mental health issues with a critical postmodernist sensibility through the lenses of literature, science and technology studies, as well as more biomedical and psychological traditions. I have two years of experience working on the HealthyVOICES Project, a longitudinal, qualitative project, still in the data collection phase, through the Center for Bioethics in the School of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

PhD student in History at the University of Nottingham. My research is on the history of psychoanalysis in France, focusing particularly on one practitioner, Françoise Dolto, who combined medical, psychological and religious approaches in the treatment of children with mental health problems. I am interested in looking at the spread of thinking about psychology and mental health in society and popular culture and how this can interact with political and sexual ideologies.

Historian; postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded project 'Florence Nightingale comes home for 2020: an historico-literary analysis of her family life' at the University of Nottingham.