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.