International Health Humanities Network Project Team
Professor Paul Crawford (Project Lead)
Professor Paul Crawford is the founder and the world’s first professor of the field of health humanities. He directs the Centre for Social Futures at the Institute of Mental Health, The University of Nottingham, UK. He has contributed to policy development in mental health and human care in the UK, advising senior politicians on the importance of the arts and humanities in healthcare, health and wellbeing. He consults on mental health, health care environments, and has spearheaded the notion of creative public health - democratising arts and humanities knowledge and practices to advance health and wellbeing.
Professor Crawford’s work has attracted multiple awards and recognition, not least Fellowships of the Royal Society of Arts, Academy of Social Sciences and Royal Society for Public Health. His pioneering work in health humanities has attracted multi-million pound research funding from Arts Humanities and Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, ESRC/MRC, UK Research and Innovation, The Leverhulme Trust and British Academy. He has led numerous AHRC funded research networks related to the arts and dementia, the representation of mental state in literature, and in the broader health humanities.
Professor Crawford has held more than £7m in prestigious research funding and currently leads major AHRC-funded studies: a) The production and evaluation of original animations with Aardman Film, www.whatsupwitheveryone.com to advance mental health literacy among young people (released February 2021). This campaign won Best Design and Content in the 2021 Design Week Awards and reached over 17m people within four months of launch alone; b) A study of Florence Nightingale at home that focuses on domestic health, psychological health and contagion (www.florencenightingale.org). The book from this study won Best Achievement in The People’s Book Prize 2022 and was longlisted for the B.S. Hughes Award for science-related writing. He is also co-investigator for the £1.25m national MARCH network into social and cultural assets for mental health.
Professor Crawford has held multiple visiting professorships or advisory board appointments in the UK and overseas. He has written over 140 publications including peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and books, most recently Mental Health Literacy and Young People (Emerald, 2022), Cabin Fever: Surviving Lockdown in the Coronavirus Pandemic (Emerald, 2021), Florence Nightingale at Home (Palgrave, 2020), The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities (Routledge, 2020) and Humiliation: Mental Health and Public Shame (Emerald, 2019). He is the Lead Editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Health Humanities (Springer, New York) and Commissioning Editor for two series: Arts for Health (Emerald); Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities (Routledge). His book Health Humanities (Palgrave, 2015) is now available in Mandarin (Springer Beijing). His other publications include the following: Evidence-based Health Communication (Open University Press, 2006), Communication in Clinical Settings (Nelson Thornes, 2006), Storytelling in Therapy (Nelson Thornes, 2004), Evidence Based Research (Open University Press, 2003) [Highly Commended, BMA Book Awards 2002] and Politics and History in William Golding: The World Turned Upside Down (University of Missouri Press, 2002). His novel, Nothing Purple, Nothing Black (Book Guild, 2002) attracted the critical acclaim of fellow writers David Lodge, Roy Porter, Sara Maitland and Paul Sayer and was optioned for film with British film producer Jack Emery (Dramahouse) until his illness halted production. He is currently working with the filmmaker Chi Thai on a new disabilities-related feature film.
Professor Crawford regularly gives keynote and plenary lectures at international conferences and has written over 100 publications including more than 80 peer reviewed papers or book chapters, 2 special issues and 10 books: Communicating Care (Nelson Thornes, 1998); Nothing Purple, Nothing Black (The Book Guild, 2002); Politics and History in William Golding (University of Missouri, 2003); Evidence Based Research (Open University Press, 2003), which was Highly Commended in the BMA Book Competition for 2004; Storytelling in Therapy (Nelson Thornes, 2004); Evidence Based Health Communication (Open University Press, 2006); Communication in Clinical Settings (Nelson Thornes, 2006); Madness in Post-1945 British and American Fiction (Palgrave, 2010); and Health Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). His major, critical work on the novelist William Golding was reviewed in the TLS and led to reprinted chapters in the prestigious Bloom's Guides (2004; 2008) and a commissioned entry on Golding in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (Oxford University Press, 2006). His acclaimed novel about mental illness, Nothing Purple, Nothing Black, resulted in various interviews in national media and an option for film by the British film producer, Jack Emery (The Drama House, London/ Florida). He has appeared on BBC Radio 2 (Walker), Today Programme and Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4, BBC 5 Live (Mayo), BBC Wales, BBC Mundo and various regional BBC programmes.
Dr Charley Baker
Dr Charley Baker is a Lecturer in Mental Health at the University of Nottingham where she teaches mental health nursing students at both Diploma/BSc level and on the Graduate Entry Nursing programme.
Charley is lead author on the co-authored monograph, Madness in Post-1945 British and American Fiction (Palgrave, 2010).She was invited contributor and literary advisor for a psychiatry textbook, Psychiatry PRN (Oxford University Press 2009), has had a chapter on rape in Angela Carter's fiction published by Rodopi in Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction, and contributes regularly for journals such as Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. She is currently working on a collection of narratives on self harm.
Charley is co-founder of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded international Madness and Literature Network and International Health Humanities Network
She has a BA and MA in literature and is working on her PhD on psychosis and postmodernism at Royal Holloway, University of London. During her studies, Charley worked in both community adult and inpatient adolescent mental health for the NHS.
Charley is Associate Editor of Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. Charley has been awarded Fellow of the Institute of Mental Health. She also serves on the Editorial Board for Journal of Medical Humanities.
She has spoken at an international level on issues of representations of mental illness in literature, and also has research interests in self harm, suicide, 'personality disorders' and the therapeutic use of reading.
Professor Brian Brown
Professor Brian Brown is Reader in Health Communication at De Montfort University. He has completed ten books and over fifty refereed journal articles. Most notably, his books have included Evidence based health communication (with P. Crawford and R. Carter, Open University Press, 2006) and the prizewinning Evidence based Research: Dilemmas and debates in heath care (with P. Crawford and C. Hicks, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003). As well as health care, his work has ranged across fields such as linguistics, education and sociology. The core of his work has focused on the interpretation of practitioner and client experiences in health care, exploring how this may be understood with a view to improving practice and with regard to theoretical development in the social sciences, particularly concerning notions of governmentality and habitus from Foucauldian and Bourdieusian sociology and how the analysis of everyday experience can offer novel theoretical developments. Notably this has included The habitus of hygiene (with P. Crawford, B. Nerlich and N. Koteyko, Social Science and Medicine, 67: 1047-1055) 'Post antibiotic apocalypse': Discourses of mutation in narratives of MRSA, (with Paul Crawford, Sociology of Health and Illness 31 (4) (in press), Soft authority: Ecologies of infection management in the working lives of modern matrons and infection control staff, (with Paul Crawford, Sociology of Health and Illness, 30: 756-771), The clinical governance of the soul (with P. Crawford, Social Science and Medicine 55: 67-81) and Clinical governmentality (with P. Crawford and L. Mullany, Journal of Applied Linguistics 2: 273-298).
Victoria Tischler
Victoria Tischler is a chartered psychologist and associate fellow of the British Psychological Society. She has over 20 years experience as an academic and retains an Honorary Associate Professor post at the Division of Psychiatry and Applied Psychology, The University of Nottingham.
Victoria's research focuses on creativity and mental health. She is co-investigator on an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded study 'dementia and imagination' (£1.2 million) that is developing and evaluating visual arts interventions for people with dementia. She is on the editorial board for the journals' Arts and Health and the Journal of Applied Arts and Health and has authored many academic papers on mental health, health and medical humanities, and arts and dementia. She regularly acts as a media consultant and presenter on art and mental health issues, for example Antiques Roadshow Detectives (2015).
Victoria is passionate about public engagement with science. She has commissioned a sculpture to commemorate the opening of the Institute of Mental (IMH) Headquarters in Nottingham 'House for a Gordian Knot'. She was arts coordinator at the IMH for 5 years where she curated exhibitions of artwork by people with mental health issues and facilitated art workshops in a maximum security forensic hospital. She co-curated the international exhibition 'art in the asylum: creativity and the evolution of psychiatry' (Djanogly gallery, 2013) that attracted over 10,000 visitors.
Victoria is a freelance research consultant and has worked for arts charities including Daily Life Ltd, The Museum of Everything, and Paintings in Hospitals.
Dr Lisa Mooney Smith
Director of Research
University of Lincoln
Dr Lisa Mooney has worked in Higher Education for over 25 years where she has worked at the interface between interdisciplinary scholarship and business. She has a background in fine art and critical theory, but is best known for her work on the study of collaborative research practices and interdisciplinary research methodology. Her current work explores how traditional arts and humanities disciplines might be better enabled to interact with the pressing demands of the knowledge engagement and impact environment, and particularly how academic institutional practices enhance or inhibit these types of interactions.
She is currently Pro Vice-Chancellor at the University of East London, responsible for research and knowledge exchange, and has recently been appointed to the prestigious Research Excellence Framework Interdisciplinary Research Advisory panel. She is actively involved in both national and international networks concerned to raise the impact and profile of the arts and humanities, and regularly writes on the shifts and changes brought about by collaborative research practices in academia and industry. In most of the work she is engaged in she strives to develop a coherent and productive relationship between industry and academic research and enterprise, ensuring brokerage between these communities supports the generation of innovative ideas, interdisciplinary partnership and productive investment.
Professor Susan Hogan
Professor Hogan has research interests in the history of medicine. She has written extensively on the relationship between the arts and insanity, and the role of the arts in rehabilitation. She is also very interested in the treatment of women within psychiatry. She has conducted 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, producing a suite of films on this topic.
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’. In addition to the above, she has also published a number of both scholarly and polemical papers on women and theories of insanity. Additionally, she has interests in the arts as a research tool and contributed chapters to Advances in Visual Methods (Pink, 2012) and Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice (Pink et al. 2017; 2019) picking up the theme again in her most recent book, Photography, part of the Emerald Arts for Health series (2022). Hogan’s work has been innovative in its application of social anthropological and sociological ideas to the arts and health field, as well as in her unwavering challenge to reductive psychological theorising.