Meet the Team

Associate Editor

Jen Allan (she/her)

Jen Allan is a clinically trained doctor, writer, and academic with a background in the medical humanities and psychology. In 2020, she completed a MA in Health Humanities at UCL, for which her thesis examined languages of encounter between the living and the dead in the unspeakable catastrophe of mass death and disappearance. She is currently working as a junior clinical fellow in A&E, in addition to a part-time RA post with the UCL Grand Challenges Inquiry on the Case for the Humanities. Jen is keen to publish work from a broad range of voices — academic, clinical, and creative alike — in order to explore different perspectives of health and illness. Her particular interests include but are not limited to: the history of ancient medicine and mental health; stigma, shame, and epistemic injustice in illness; intimacy and desire; monstrosity and monster theory; and the anthropology of death and mourning rituals.

See what Jen has been posting on The Polyphony here.

Sophie Battell (she/her)

I am a Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, where I teach modules in early modern literature.  Prior to joining Exeter in September 2018, I was based at Cardiff University, where I taught for four years on the BA and MA English Literature degrees, also completing my PhD there in early 2018.  My thesis explored hospitality in Shakespeare’s plays, and I am currently working on a monograph on hospitality in early modern literature and culture.  In 2018/19 I am a Holland Visiting Fellow at Durham University.  During my three-month research fellowship, I will be investigating the History of Science Printed Collections.  This project reflects my developing interest in the medical humanities and, in particular, early science writings and work related to the history of the emotions.

I welcome proposals from academic or creative practitioners working at the intersection of the medical humanities and any of the following areas: 

• Medieval and Early Modern  
• English Literature 
• History of Science
• History of the Emotions 

While in no way limited to these suggestions, prospective submissions might include: critical pieces, reflective accounts, and insights into research projects or works-in-progress. I am also interested in how we teach the medical humanities, and would welcome articles related to pedagogy.  I am keen to promote the research of early career academics and I would especially like to encourage submissions from PhD students and independent scholars.  If you would like an informal discussion please don’t hesitate to contact me at sophie.e.battell@durham.ac.uk.

Reviews Editor

Grace Brimacombe-Rand (she/her)

Grace is a PhD researcher in English at King’s College London, with a MSc in Literature and Modernity from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in English from Durham University. Her research investigates the representation of chronic pain and sexual violence in contemporary women’s writing, exploring the relationship between marginalised bodies and contemporary society across both her critical work in the feminist medical humanities and her own creative practice in prose and poetry. She welcomes reviewers working on any topic across the medical humanities, particularly those written from lived experience of illness and disability.

Grace’s interdisciplinary approach champions the integration of TV and Film, theatre and visual art as mediums through which key research areas in the medical humanities can be explored, and she encourages reviewers to look at the way debates centering bodies, health, illness and caretaking can be explored through facets of the contemporary. Stylistically, Grace is open to reviews taking any form the reviewer feels is the most expansive for them, and is particularly interested in practice research, championing work from creative practitioners across all mediums, including prose, poetry and the visual arts.

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Associate Editor

Harriet Cooper (she/her)

Harriet Cooper has a wide range of research interests in the medical humanities, and is especially curious about the politics of knowledge production in this evolving field. Relatedly, Harriet is fascinated by the puzzles presented by experiential and embodied knowledges: how do we interrogate and represent lived experience? She also likes to ponder the question of how the categories of method and disciplinary identity are invoked across the humanities and social sciences to shape research agendas. Since being awarded her PhD in critical disability studies from Birkbeck, University of London in 2015, Harriet has been working on a qualitative social research project at the University of East Anglia, which is funded by the Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) East of England.

See what Harriet has been posting on The Polyphony here.

Columnist

Nathan Fleshner (he/him)

Nathan Fleshner is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Tennessee, USA. While his Ph.D. (Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, USA) is in music theory and analysis, he has long held an interest in psychology, the brain, and music’s influence on both. His research focuses on the analysis of music that depicts dreams, mental illness, and trauma and on connections between the music analytic process and the psychoanalytic and therapeutic processes.

See what Nathan has been posting on The Polyphony here.

Associate Editor

Andy Fletcher (he/him)

After studying music at Newcastle University, Andy completed a PhD on music and mental wellbeing, cementing his interest in arts and health – and mental health in particular. This led to a postdoctoral role at Durham University on the ERC-funded Knowledge for Use project, which blended health-related case studies with philosophical research. Collaborating with world-class experts across disciplines was something of a ‘baptism of fire’ but it unearthed deeper interests in objectivity, evidence and epistemic justice. In January 2022, Andy took up an ethnographer role on Healthier Working Lives at King’s College London, again working with an interdisciplinary team to develop novel embedded co-design methods for understanding the experiences of older care workers. He is especially keen to explore cultural and creative approaches to generating new forms of knowledge, and in developing ways to amalgamate diverse knowledge types to inform policy and practice. More importantly, Andy plays the bass guitar quite badly and has a tabby cat called Winston, who sings.

Columnist

Beata Gubacsi (she/her)

Beata Gubacsi is a final year PhD student at the University of Liverpool. Her current research project, provisionally entitled Literature of Monstrosity: Posthumanism and Authorship, seeks to establish connections between critical posthumanism and New Weird through their understanding and representation of human and non-human sentience and subjectivity, focusing on the meta-features of the popular figure of the monster. She has been involved in Bluecoat’s science fiction projects as part of her LiNK placement, and co-hosted workshops at the Being Human Festival, Tate Exchange and Nottingham New Art Exchange in 2015-16. She is the co-ordinator of the Current Research in Speculative Fiction Conference since 2017. Her research interests are gender and body studies, trauma studies and psychoanalysis, ecocriticism and animal studies, fantastic literatures and genre theory, game narratives, and representations of mental illness in popular culture with special interest in Gothic and horror.

See what Beata has been posting on The Polyphony here.

Reviews Editor

Alex Henry (he/him)

Alex Henry is a LAHRI Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, where he also teaches in the School of English. His research on crip theory, chronic illness and contemporary women’s writing brings work from the critical medical humanities into dialogue with literary disability studies, feminist epistemology and critical race theory, and demonstrates his broad interests in interdisciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship.

In addition to these areas of interest, he would welcome contact from reviewers working on any topic across the medical humanities, particularly reviewers who engage with emerging scholarly voices and intersectional critical methodologies.

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Guest Editor, Polyphony Meets China

Rong Huang

Rong Huang is a Visiting Fellow in the Narrative Practices Lab and a Guest Editor at The Polyphony for our ‘Polyphony Meets China’ initiative. She is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Narrative Medicine, Peking University Health Science Centre, with research interests in narrative medicine, contemporary English literature and life writing. During her Fellowship, Rong will be working to develop new research collaborations in Narrative Practices in Health and Digital Storytelling, while also identifying wider opportunities to grow the partnership between IMH and Peeking University.

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Columnist

Victoria Hume (she/her)

Victoria Hume is a composer, arts manager and researcher specialising in the meeting points between the arts, medicine and health. She is currently Director of the UK’s new Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance and a Research Associate in the medical humanities at WiSER (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), focusing particularly on the arts as research. In 2017 she received a distinction for a Masters in Music and Health Communication focused on hospital-induced delirium. Prior to that she was a hospital arts manager in the NHS for 15 years. Her 2016 EP, Closing (released on Lost Map records), featured on Lauren Laverne’s Best of 2016 playlist (BBC Radio6 Music).

See what Victoria has been posting on The Polyphony here.

Associate Editor

Anna Jamieson

Anna Jamieson is an interdisciplinary cultural historian specialising in visual and material cultures of the late eighteenth century. Awarded her PhD in cultural, social and institutional responses to female insanity from Birkbeck, University of London, in 2020, Anna is currently a Birkbeck Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Researcher, working on women’s mental illness, eighteenth-century private madhouses and asylum tourism. Later this year, she will undertake a John Rylands Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship, for a project titled ‘“A Touch of the Blue Devils”: Women, Mental Health and Self-Care in England, 1750- 1850’. With an interest in gender and the history of psychiatry, patient agency and consumerism, dark tourism, spectacle and enfreakment, Anna is particularly keen to publish articles that address the lived experience of illnesses, spaces of healthcare and their stereotypes, and the intersections between medical humanities and material culture. Additionally, she is interested in forging ties between postgraduate and early career researchers from both clinical and non-clinical medical humanities backgrounds, and to publish pieces that address the methodological challenges of working within an interdisciplinary field.

See what Anna has commissioned for The Polyphony 

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Associate Editor | Editor in Chief

Fiona Johnstone (she/her)

Fiona Johnstone is an art historian with a particular interest in the relationship between visual culture and the medical humanities. She has been an Associate Editor with The Polyphony since the site launched in October 2018, and was Editor in Chief from 2019 to 2020.

Fiona was PI of the Wellcome-funded project “Thinking Through Things” (October 2019 to March 2021) which engaged with and expanded the visual and material turn in the medical humanities.

She is the author of AIDS & Representation: Portraits and Self-Portraits during the AIDS Crisis in America (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), and editor of the collected volume Anti-Portraiture: Challenging the Limits of the Portrait (Bloomsbury, 2020). Fiona co-curated the 2017 exhibition Mr A Moves in Mysterious Ways: Selected Artists from the Adamson Collection. She lectures in the History and Theory of Photography at Middlesex University.

Fiona is particularly interested in discussing ideas for articles that relates to art and photography, visual and material culture, and curating: this might include reviews of exhibitions, events, or new publications; provocations or position pieces; or something more creative! She is also interested in articles that address pedagogic aspects of Medical Humanities, especially in relation to artistic practice.

See what Fiona has been posting on The Polyphony here.

Reviews Editor

Anna Kemball (she/her)

Anna Kemball is a PhD candidate in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, where she has also taught English Literature. Her thesis, funded by the AHRC, brings the critical medical humanities and Indigenous studies into closer relation. Her research demonstrates a commitment to global methodological developments within the critical medical humanities, combined with an awareness of the challenges posed by cross-cultural scholarship.

Outside of Anna’s own research interests, she would be happy to work with reviewers on any topic within the medical humanities. She would particularly welcome non-conventional reviews, including those which foreground a reviewer’s relationship to scholarship that they have found formative or meaningful.

Associate Editor

Chase Ledin (he/him)

Chase Ledin is a Lecturer in Social Science and Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. His work investigates sexual health promotion and sociocultural aspects of unprescribed antibiotic use amongst gay and bisexual men in the UK. More broadly, his research and teaching cuts across the medical humanities, science and technology studies, queer cultural studies, and medical sociology.

Chase welcomes commissions that cross disciplinary boundaries, especially related to gender and sexuality, technology and medicine, and speculative and assemblage theories in the humanities and social sciences.

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Associate Editor

Katrina Longhurst (she/her)

I am a PhD student based in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where I also teach contemporary literature. Situated across literary studies, disability studies, and the medical humanities, my thesis explores contemporary narratives of mental illness across various genres of life writing. My research investigates how writers with experiences of mental illness grapple with the challenges of producing self-narrative about mental distress in literarily innovative texts that test the boundaries of personhood and autobiography. I also reflect upon the consequences of such texts for further developing critical medical humanities methodologies.

I am interested in publishing pieces that showcase the diversity and richness of work being undertaken across the medical humanities at all levels of scholarship. Alongside my research interests in mental health, trauma, and autobiography, I am particularly committed to curating writing that provokes us to think more critically about the scope and methodologies of the field; with this in mind I’d especially like to encourage people working on the intersections of medical humanities with feminisms, queer theory, transgender studies, postcolonial studies, and disability studies to get in touch.

See what Katrina has been posting on The Polyphony here.

Website Administrator

Sarah McLusky (she/her)

Associate Editor

Tehseen Noorani (he/him)

My research spans medical anthropology and science and technology studies. Currently I am writing an ethnographic monograph bridging the phenomenologies and practices of working upon psychedelic experiences on the one hand, and experiences labelled ‘psychotic’ on the other. I received my PhD in 2012 in socio-legal studies from the University of Bristol, analysing formations of knowledge and authority in mental health self-help and mutual aid collectives. Since then I have been researching ‘consciousness cultures’ more broadly, including the resurgence of overground and underground interest in the use of drugs to produce psychedelic experiences. From 2013-2015 I spearheaded qualitative research as part of a clinical trials team studying psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University, and I have since taught at New York University and the University of East London. In 2008, I co-founded the Authority Research Network, an early-career collective of academics based in the UK, Ireland and Brazil.

While I am happy to work with reviews on any topic, my particular interests lie in the areas of:

• Politics of knowledge, evidence and authority,
• Spirituality, mysticism and mythology,
• Altered states and extreme/limit experiences, and
• Algorithmic life and computational psychiatry.

I am happy to work with any kind of review format, and am particularly interested in reviews that experiment with form and incorporate reflexivity. I welcome interviews with authors, book forums with multiple reviewers, and single reviews of multiple books on the same topic.

See what Tehseen has been posting on The Polyphony here.

Guest Editor, Polyphony Meets India

Arya Ray (he/him)

Arya Ray is a literary scholar interested in ghost stories, folktales and indigenous modes of storytelling within global literatures and cultures. During his MA from Durham University, he did a comparative study of multiple editions of Frankenstein and the early gothic bluebooks of the 1770s-1820s around the themes of ‘doubling’ and ‘loving’, using methods of literary analysis, digital humanities, and life studies. Currently, he is working as a Research Assistant with the Wellcome-funded ReaderBank project, where he works with an interdisciplinary team of researchers to study experiences of reading, imagination and wellbeing. He is presently researching long-nineteenth century Bengali ghostly folklore and its relationship with European gothic through discourses of bodily monstrosity and cultural memory. 

With a background in experimental theatre and music, Arya is particularly keen to publish pieces that come from perspectives of creative practice like visual and performance art, including various modes of storytelling of experiences of illness. He is interested in recovering the narratives that fall through the schisms created by barriers language, academia and disciplines owing to the multicultural and diverse sociocultural landscapes of South Asia. 

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Associate Editor

Ryan Ross (he/him)

I completed my PhD at the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London in 2017. My research focuses on the history of trauma and of medicine, but I maintain a broad interest in the social sciences and in science and technology studies. I am particularly interested in research on that implicates the history or sociology of the brain and mind sciences.

I would strongly encourage contributors to get in touch with any proposals or ideas for the Blog relating to:

• The History of Science, Technology and Medicine;
• Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis or Psychology;
• The Neuroscientific Turn;
• The Study of Affect and/or Memory;
• The Material Turn and/or Actor Network Theory

Columnist

Leah Sidi (she/her)

Leah is completing a PhD on dramaturgies of mental suffering in the theatre of Sarah Kane at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests include contemporary theatre; mental health and disability politics and activism; psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the humanities; and representations of community care.

See what Leah has been posting on The Polyphony here.

Associate Editor

Fred Spence (they/them)

I completed my Wellcome-funded PhD in English Literature at the University of Glasgow in 2021. My project brought Scottish studies and the medical humanities into dialogue. It examined how the controversial public health term the ‘Glasgow effect’ was used in the press, and how contemporary Scottish literature represents the stigmatised health issues (around mental distress, alcohol, diet and body weight) associated with the ‘Glasgow effect’. In 2021, I worked on the depiction of health care professionals and institutions of care in the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive during a public engagement internship.

I am one of the founding editors of The Polyphony and was Editor in Chief from January 2021 to June 2022. I’m keen to publish artist, activist, patient/service user, carer and practitioner voices alongside academic perspectives. I’m particularly interested in provocations or more personal, exploratory pieces that reflect on our processes, challenges, failures, motivations and experiences across the medical humanities. I’m also interested in building community and creating dialogue, and so welcome interviews, reviews and responses.

See what Fred has been posting on The Polyphony here.

Associate Editor

Nicole Xuan Chen (she/her)

Nicole is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Her project centres on a sudden cluster of biofictions published within a decade or so from the end of last century that feature Virginia Woolf as the main protagonist-subject. Under the broad framework of experimental life-writing, she studies them thematically via such lenses as illness narrative, image-text intersectionality, and the modernist culture of conversation. She is on the reader panel for James Tait Black Prize Biography Section and is the editor and chief Chinese translator of the anthology Literary Medicine: Brain Diseases and Doctors in Novels, Theatre, and Film. She is a research member at the Bio-Health Narrative Research Centre at the Southern Medical University (SMU, PRC), and engages with the design of volunteer training programme for the Bio-Health Story Sharing Centre at SMU. Before her PhD programme, she taught both Literary Translation to English Language undergraduates as well as English Language to medical students at SMU.

In 2021, Nicole initiated a collaborative project between The Polyphony and the Bio-Health Narrative Research Centre, SMU, in the hope of creating intercultural dialogue and introducing leading-edge concepts and theories of medical humanities to China. She is particularly interested in discussing ideas for articles that address following areas:
• Life-writing pieces exploring language’s possibility to write illness and pain
• Stereotypes and stigmas of illnesses across cultures
• Humanities disciplines in healthcare education curriculum
• Narrative psychology and narrative therapy

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