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Staff Profile

Professor Anne Whitehead

Prof of Modern & Contemporary Literature

Background

Background

I am a professor of English Literature at Newcastle University, where I teach courses relating to modern and contemporary literature. My core research interests lie in medical humanities, and memory and trauma studies. I am currently the School Director of Research and I will be co-ordinating the REF2029 submission for English Literature and Creative Writing. I have previously held the roles of School Impact Director, overseeing the development of Impact Case Studies for REF2021, and School Postgraduate Director.


At Faculty level I co-direct the Medical Humanities Network, a research group that brings together scholars from across the university who work at the intersection between the arts and humanities and medicine.


Beyond Newcastle University, I am a member of the AHRC Peer Review College (2017-26) and I have reviewed funding applications for the Leverhulme Trust, the Wellcome Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Icelandic Research Fund, the FWO Vlanderen, and the National University of Ireland. I am a founding and steering group member of the Wellcome funded Northern Network for Medical Humanities, I sit on the international advisory board of the Centre for Women's Mental Health at Uppsala University in Sweden and I am on the editorial advisory board for the Edinburgh University Press book series Contemporary Cultural Studies of Illness, Health and Medicine. I am currently also an external examiner for the BSc. Medical Humanities program at Glasgow University (2023-27).


Google Scholar Profile: Click here.


Research

My research has focused on a number of critical keywords, each of which has given me an opportunity to explore its significance in social, cultural and literary terms. Engaged research projects have then enabled me to share my insights beyond the university, building them into award-winning collaborative projects involving local communities and cultural organisations.


1. Trauma

My monograph Trauma Fiction offered the first sustained analysis of how trauma theory intersects with contemporary literary fiction. In doing so, it identified several key tropes and formal devices that authors have used to address the challenge of representing traumatic experience in their novels. W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, which I co-edited with J. J. Long, was published as a companion volume, and was the first collection of essays on Sebald to be published in English.

I have supervised a range of doctoral projects relating to trauma writing. These include studies of complicity in the contemporary novel, the representation of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in Cypriot children’s literature, literary and filmic representations of political torture from Algiers to Guantanamo, and the importance of humour in literature of the First World War.

My expertise in trauma fiction led to me working in partnership with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books. Seven Stories was keen to build capacity for adult-facing exhibitions and my expertise in how contemporary writers convey traumatic experiences, including war, supported the curation of the exhibition Michael Morpurgo: A Lifetime in Stories. The project was funded by an Innovate UK/AHRC Knowledge Transfer Partnership and it was the first KTP to be awarded in English studies. It was the recipient of the Times Higher Leadership and Management Award for Knowledge Exchange Project of the Year in 2017, and it contributed to an Impact Case Study in REF2021. 


2. Memory

My monograph Memory: New Critical Idiom offered a cultural history of memory from ancient Greece to the present day, tracing links between the changing conceptualisations of memory and literary representations. The study identified a series of key tropes around which the conceptualisation of memory has consolidated in Western thought; namely, inscription, spatial metaphors, and body memory. The monograph was published in tandem with Theories of Memory: A Reader, which offered an introduction to the field of memory studies for students of literature. Published jointly with Johns Hopkins University Press, the Reader has been widely used for teaching in North American literature courses. 

My research interests in memory and memorialisation underpinned a community-based research project, Sounding the Angel: Documenting the Grassroots Memorial at the Angel of the North. This project focused on making a record of the spontaneous memorial site that has emerged in a stand of trees at the Angel of the North in Gateshead. Working with sound recordist David de la Haye, we created a sound work that combined interviews with people who had left memorial tributes at the Angel, sound recordings of the site across the seasons, and the ‘voice’ of the Angel itself, captured through contact microphones. The project featured in The Guardian, and Radio 4's Today and Sunday programs, and has been included as a case study in the National Archives' guidance for documenting spontaneous memorials.  


3. Empathy

In 2016, I co-edited the Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, which sought to ground the field more fully within a critical framework. We identified the ‘three Es’ that had defined the medical humanities to date – ethics, education, and experience – and proposed a new ‘E’ around which the field might organise itself: namely, Entanglement. The volume also flagged Empathy as a further ‘E’ that could be added to the list, and my monograph Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction took this project forward, positioning Empathy as a key concept for the medical humanities. The study resituated the contemporary novel from a transparent window onto another’s illness experience to engaging critically with the question of empathy and its limits. A review in Contemporary Literature noted that the book was ‘erudite, wide-ranging and supremely helpful’, and that it offered ‘a clear-eyed survey of the uses to which empathy has been put, and a thoughtful reimagination of the work of empathy through its meticulous readings.’

My expertise in this area underpinned a collaboration with Judith Rankin, Professor of Maternal and Child Health at Newcastle University, and the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary. Working with artist Kate Sweeney, we co-created a short, animated film with parents who had lost a baby from a multiple pregnancy –a complex form of loss in which joy at the birth of one baby is experienced at the same time as grief at the loss of the co-twin. The project documented the parents as they gathered materials to make a series of inks, and the inks were as important as the film in archiving the parents’ experience, in their distillation of those aspects of grief that are difficult to express in words. The project was the recipient of a Newcastle University Engagement and Place Award for Health, Wellbeing and Societal Benefit in 2023.


My most recent research worked across trauma, memory, and empathy to ask how we tell the story of losing a loved one to suicide. Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Perspective focuses not on why a suicide happened but rather on when, how, and where, calling attention to suicide’s materiality as well as its materialisation. In relation to trauma, I probe the paradox that a suicide both breaks or shatters the everyday and that it does not, in the sense that the ordinary rhythms of life continue on regardless. This insight opens out into an exploration of the ways in which suicide unsettles because it weaves together the extraordinary and the mundane. My interests in memory and memorialisation underpin my discussion of the often low-key and spontaneous acts of memorialisation that commemorate deaths by suicide. The book is animated by the question of how we relate to suicide, and my work on empathy informs its movement away from offering a transparent window onto my own experience of losing a sister to suicide, and towards an emphasis on suicide as a pervasive and routine presence in all of our everyday lives, such that we might helpfully think through our varying degrees of kinship with it.

        

You can read more about my recent research on my blog.






    



Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

I lecture on the stage 1 module Transformations and contribute lectures and seminars to Contemporary Cultures, a large team-taught module at stage 2. My sole taught module at stage 3, Contemporary Experimental Writing and Medicine, looks at how medical themes have been explored across a range of literary genres paying close attention to questions of form. I also supervise stage 3 dissertations on contemporary topics.

 

Doctoral Supervision

I am an experienced supervisor of doctoral projects and welcome applications in all areas of my expertise. I am currently supervising the following PhD projects:

Tamzin Mackie, 'Julia Darling's New Vocabularies of Pain: Mapping Body, Gender and Place' (Northern Bridge funded English Literature PhD; co-supervisors Dr Rosalind Haslett and Professor Jane Macnaughton).

Liz Sands, 'Spectres of Thatcherism: Melancholia and Spaces of Isolation in Contemporary Women's Writing' (Wellcome Trust funded English Literature PhD; co-supervisors Dr Ella Dzelzainis and Professor Clare Bambra).   


Publications