Mental Health Humanities: People

Hareth is a Professor of health economics. He holds a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award (2020-2024) to research investments in mental health promotion in schools and workplaces. 

Hareth’s research interests include the measurement of wellbeing and preferences, the role of family (informal) care in the economic evaluation and decision-making, the economics of mental health, and ...

I am a philosopher of the cognitive sciences, focusing on the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry. I am also interested in biomedical ethics.

Matthew is an academic psychiatrist and Director of the Institute for Mental Health at the University.  He is a leader in the field of early psychosis and in the philosophy and ethics of mental health.

Sarah Carr is an academic with a particular interest in service user and survivor knowledge and research. She has personal experience of mental distress and mental health service use and uses this to inform all her work.

My research focuses on the relationships between Victorian literature, science, medicine, and material culture. I am particularly interested in the study and depiction of the senses and in particular on new ways of listening and thinking about sound in the nineteenth century. My current work is on explorations of the body’s physiological and psychological responses to sound and music in the ...

I am Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality and a specialist in interdisciplinary sexuality and gender studies, critical theory, and the history of diagnostic and cultural concepts. My enduring research interest is in questions of exceptionality, difficulty, and (ab)normality as they are represented and understood in cultural, medical, and political fields. My most recent work has been on ...

Dr Sandhya Duggal is a research fellow at the School of Social Policy, based in the Department of Social Work and Social Care.

Sandhya is currently a co-investigator on a project funded by the School for Social Care Research (NIHR), which aims to explore the process and impact of implementing combinations of asset/strength-based approaches within adult social care, and to assess their ...

Science and (non-) Religion in Society and Culture. Public Perceptions of Science and/or (non-) Religion.

Professor Fern Elsdon-Baker is part of the Birmingham Plastics Network, an interdisciplinary team of more than 40 academics working together to shape the fate and sustainable future of plastics.  This unique team brings together chemists, environmental scientists, philosophers, ...

Dr Evans is the author of numerous publications on gender and sexuality, and has been invited to speak on these areas at academic conferences, cultural and activist events both in the UK and internationally. They are particularly engaged in debates around feminist, queer and transgender theories. 

Dr Sarah-Jane Fenton is a Lecturer in Mental Health Policy at the Institute for Mental Health (IMH).

The IMH is an interdisciplinary research centre with a specific youth mental health focus that will deliver high quality internationally relevant research to inform and impact upon public policy and practice and improve the care and outcomes for people experiencing problems with their mental ...

My teaching focusses on the social and cultural aspects of eighteenth-century Britain. I'm particularly interested in how men and women experienced their lives in the context of wider understandings of power, gender and the body. 

I’m a senior lecturer in contemporary literature and digital cultures and co-director of the Centre for Digital Cultures in the department of English Literature.

I’m CO-I on the AHRC-funded Ambient Literature project and acted as a UK representative for the COST-funded European EREAD (evolution of reading in the age of digitisation) research network.

My research interests focus ...

Dr Heggie is a historian of modern science and medicine, with a particular interest in the history of nineteenth and twentieth century biomedical and life sciences. She also dabbles in the philosophy of science.

She has published books on the history of exploration and physiology, and on sports medicine, and many articles and chapters on a range of topics from Victorian nursing and public health ...

Dr Clara Humpston is a Research Fellow in Youth Mental Health Methodology at the Institute for Mental Health. Her research interests mainly focus on schizophrenia-spectrum psychoses, although she is also interested in novel therapies for affective disorders. Her research experiences span from psychopharmacology to cognitive neuropsychiatry to phenomenology, and is heavily involved with the ...

Dr Sabena Jameel is a Clinical Academic. She has three main portfolio roles working for the various Medical School programmes. These roles involve teaching, leadership and management, with a golden thread of professionalism running through them all. Dr Jameel is also clinical active, working in the General Practice setting.

My research and teaching areas span twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing, with a particular focus on the history and theory of the novel. Most recently, I’ve been working on the politics and poetics of affect in contemporary fiction and life-writing, combining my interests in the history of emotions, disability studies, and narrative medicine.

Dina Kiwan is a Professor in Comparative Education, having joined the department in January 2017. Her research programme focuses on citizenship and inclusion, and is interdisciplinary and comparative in scope. Her interests centre around sociological and politico-philosophical examinations of inclusive citizenship through the lens of education policy, naturalization policy and migration policy, ...

Professor Peter Kraftl is best known for his research on children’s geographies, and especially for research into the emotions, affects, materialities and practices that make up their everyday lives. He also publishes on geographies of education and architecture. He is currently an Editor of the journals Area and Children’s Geographies and was a founding member of the Geographies of ...

Dr Irina Kuznetsova's research expertise includes areas of migration, forced displacement, health, and critical urbanism. Her recent projects focus on social consequences of population displacement in Ukraine, Russia, Rwanda, Nigeria and Japan, including mental health and well-being, and the impact of migration on rural communities.

An anthropologist by background, Anna Lavis is a Lecturer in Medical Sociology and Qualitative Methods in the Social Studies in Medicine (SSiM) Team in the Institute of Applied Health Research. 

Her work explores individuals’ and informal caregivers’ experiences and subjectivities of mental illness and distress across a range of social and cultural contexts, both offline and on ...

Jeannette Littlemore is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on figurative language and explores the facilitative and debilitative role played by metaphor and metonymy in language education and in cross-linguistic communication. She is interested in the ways in which emotional ...

Karen joined HSMC as a Senior Lecturer in Healthcare Policy and Management in November 2013. Originally qualifying as a clinical psychologist, Karen has over thirty years’ experience in the health and social care sector, including direct service provision and commissioning. For the past fifteen years Karen has been involved in research, consultancy and system development for a broad range ...

Social, cultural and military history of the two World Wars, including a focus on drug culture, consumption and control.

Jessica Pykett is a social and political geographer with research interests in governance, knowledge practices, policy innovation and political subjectivities.  Her research has focused on affective and emotional techniques of governance, and the influence of neuroscience and behavioural science on public policy and economic theory. Current work is on the intersections of neuroscience and ...

Dr Reniers is a research psychologist investigating the interplay between neurobiological, clinical and behavioural aspects of adolescent development and youth mental health. Her research involves the transition from health to disease, with a particular interest in emerging mental health problems (psychosis), neuroimaging (MRI and fMRI), social cognition (empathy, psychosocial functioning), ...

I joined the Shakespeare Institute in 2013, having been lecturing at Cambridge University for 7 years. I began my career as a professional actor, training at LAMDA and working quite extensively in theatre. Since deciding to move into academia my main research interests have been in the field of Shakespeare in performance, in particular verse speaking, adaptation and theatre history.  I ...

I work on modern literature and culture. My main areas of interest are modernism, the literature of the First World War, life writing, literary impressionism, and futurology.

• Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford University Press, 1996)
• Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press, 2010)
• Imagined Futures: Writing, Science ...

Leonard Smith is a social historian with a special interest in the history of psychiatry and mental health institutions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. His research has focussed primarily on England and the former British West Indian colonies. It encompasses the development of both private madhouses and public lunatic asylums, those who established and managed them, and the ...

Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge’s work focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary literature, political theory, and history, Human Rights, and Refugee Studies, drawing on the interdisciplinary connections between literature, history, politics, law, and social policy. Her early work was concerned with the effects of modern violence on the mind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (The ...

I am a cultural historian and literary scholar interested in the nature of emotional experience and its relation to art - in particular Shakespeare’s. My research splits into two distinct but nonetheless related strands: the cultural history of the emotions, especially sadness, and the performance of Shakespeare today.

I am a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy working primarily in the philosophy of mind and psychology.

Since joining the department in 2017, my work has focussed on the interface between philosophy and cognitive science. I have worked especially on consciousness, perception, and attention. I’m especially interested in how these faculties interact with each other in the mind. My work in these areas is collected in my papers (below).

My current focus is on a monograph on psychological natural ...

Rachel is Professor of Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health at the University of Birmingham, and Consultant Psychiatrist in the Birmingham Early Intervention Services. Her research Interest is within the field of major mental illness; particularly schizophrenia and co-morbid depression in early phases of illness. Recent projects have developed the investigation of inflammatory models of psychosis ...

Sanne’s research explores how conflict affects gender relations. She is interested in understanding whether and how transitional justice mechanisms are capable of transforming gendered and other structural inequalities, engaging with the connections between conflict, development and social justice. She uses ethnographic, participatory and creative research methods to understand the lived ...

I am a historian of the English reformation, with interests in the history and theology of late-medieval and early modern Europe more broadly.  My research focuses on the religious and cultural history of England over the course of the long sixteenth century. 

 

Rebecca is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the four-year AHRC-funded project, ‘Forged by Fire: Burns Injuries and Identity in Britain, c.1800-2000’.

Rebecca is a historian of medicine and of Quakers. Her research and publications centre on the history of psychiatry, mental health, neurosurgery, neurodiversity, and First World War medicine and disability. She has worked with ...