International Health Humanities Network Membership

I am senior lecturer in eighteenth and ninetheenth-century literature at Northumbria University. My research is primarily focused upon autobiographical prose, poetry, letters, pamphlets, and diaries, written by those who identify themselves as having experienced what we would now call depression; specifically in the ways people describe the experience in the absence of an established medical model / vocabulary.  I am also interested in the ways the that lifestories are constructed, and the competing claims made by autobiography, biography, biopics, and fictionalised versions of the 'true' story of a subject that has attained the status of celebrity, which is further complicated when the mental faculties of the subject are called into question.

i am co-author of 'Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century; Before Depression' (Palgrave, 2011), and General Editore and Editore of 'Depression and Melancholy 1660-1800', 4 Volumes (Pickering and Chatto, 2012). I am currently co-director of a three year research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled 'Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture c. 1660-1832'. An additional strand to my above research being developed in line with this project is the relationship between celebrity endorsement and the visibility of illness, and the impact that this relationship has upon debates about stigma and promotion.