International Health Humanities Network Membership

I am Lecturer in French Studies at Queen's University Belfast, specialising in medico-literary culture of 19th- and, increasingly, 20th-century France. My research interests include naturalism; the illness narrative (especially autopathography); literary representations of corporeality, contagion and disease; public health and medico-literary cultures in nineteenth-century France. I am currently involved in two reseach projects: (i) an investigation of the language of pain in French autopathographies; and (ii) a monograph project which explores narrative cross-currents in nineteenth-century France by analysing the ways in which scientific, medical and literary writers developed a common tradition of figurative tropes, myths and metaphors in respect of syphilis which, of the so-called social diseases, had the greatest impact on the cultural imagination of the time.

Institutional Website: http://pure.qub.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/steven-wilson(a853a0e3-da09-4409-8cb2-65078bf774e4).html