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Staff Profile

Staff Profile

Professor Anne Whitehead

Prof of Modern and Contemporary Lit

Background

Background

Anne has worked at Newcastle University since she was appointed as a lecturer in 1999. Prior to this, she held a two-year Earl Grey Memorial post-doctoral research fellowship at Newcastle. 

Anne has research and teaching interests in contemporary fiction and poetry; the intersections between creative and critical writing; medical humanities; literatures of care, empathy, and affect; and the literary representation of memory and trauma. 


Internal Roles

Anne is Director of Research and Impact for the School of English.

She previously held the roles of Deputy Head of the School and Director of Impact (2017-2021) and Director of Postgraduate Research (2013-2016).  

At Faculty level, Anne is a co-lead of the Newcastle University Medical Humanities Network. 


External Roles

Anne is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College (2017-22) and she has 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.  

Anne is a founding and steering group member of the Wellcome funded Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research.  She sits on the editorial advisory board of the Edinburgh University Press book series Contemporary Cultural Studies of Illness, Health and Medicine. 

Anne is currently an external examiner on the MA in Medical Humanities: Bodies, Cultures and Ideas at Birkbeck, University of London. She has previously been appointed as external examiner of the undergraduate English Literature degrees at Cardiff University (2011-2014) and Bristol University (2016-20). Anne has examined PhDs at institutions in the UK, Finland, Australia, and Singapore.  



Research

Current Research

Anne's monograph, Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Perspective, will be published with Bloomsbury Press (Academic) in February 2023, as one of the first publications in the Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities series. 

Anne is part of a research partnership with the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle and the Tiny Lives Trust. Collaborating with Judith Rankin (Professor of Maternal and Child Health at Newcastle University), Nicholas Embleton (Consultant Neonatal Paediatrician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary), and artist and film-maker Kate Sweeney, she is working with parents who have lost one or more babies from a multiple pregnancy to ask how we might better understand their experiences and represent them to others.  The first phase of the project will work with parents to make inks from materials of their choosing, and in the second phase these inks will be used to make a short, animated film. 

Anne has submitted an article on contemporary elegies of maternal loss, which is scheduled to be published in a special issue of Literature and Medicine (ed. Sara Wasson, Spring 2023).  

       

Research Profile

Anne has written the monograph Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction: An Intervention in Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Through a series of textual readings, Anne examines how the contemporary novel can illuminate the operations of empathy, with an emphasis on fiction's ability to hold open different voices and possibilities.     

Anne co-edited with Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). This volume asks how interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique, and become productively entangled with, the medical understanding of the human both individually and collectively.

Anne's other books include Memory: New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2008) and Theories of Memory: A Reader, co-edited with Michael Rossington (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Anne is also the author of Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2004), and she co-edited with J. J. Long the first collection of essays on W. G. Sebald to be published in English, W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2004).

Anne has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature and Textual Practice and she co-edited a special issue of Feminist Theory on feminism and affect with Carolyn Pedwell (2012).  

     

Research Funding

Anne was PI on an Innovate UK/AHRC funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children's Books, working with Lucy Pearson and Jessica Medhurst. Drawing on the newly acquired Michael Morpurgo archive, the project used literature research skills to inform the design of the exhibition Michael Morpurgo: A Lifetime in Stories, which toured to the V&A Museum of Childhood, amongst other venues. The aim of the partnership was to embed into Seven Stories the capacity to interpret collections for adult as well as child audiences. One of the first KTPs to be awarded nationally in English Literature, the project was the recipient of the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Award for Knowledge Exchange Project of the Year, 2017. 

Anne has held research grants from the AHRC to support her work on trauma and on memory. 



Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

Anne lectures on the stage 1 module Transformations and contributes lectures on literature and biopolitics to Contemporary Cultures, a large team-taught module at stage 2. Her 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. Anne also supervises stage 3 dissertations on contemporary topics.

Anne has co-taught with Jennifer Richards a Student Selected Component for stage 4 medical students at Newcastle University. She also participated in an Erasmus Teaching Exchange with Stef Craps at Ghent University.  

 

Postgraduate Teaching

Anne contributes a session to the MA Research Methods training module and she supervises MA dissertations. She also runs an introductory session on the medical humanities for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Doctoral Training Program, Thinking Theories and Methods.


Doctoral Supervision

Anne is an experienced supervisor of doctoral projects and welcomes applications in all areas of her expertise. 

Anne is currently supervising the critical component of Toby Martinez de las Rivas' Northern Bridge funded Creative Writing PhD. Toby was a recipient of the Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and a participant in the Faber New Poets scheme. He has two poetry collections published by Faber. The creative component of the project is co-supervised by Sinead Morrissey and Sean O'Brien.

From autumn 2022, Anne will be lead supervisor of Tamzin Mackie's Northern Bridge funded PhD, 'Julia Darling's New Vocabularies of Pain: Mapping Body, Gender and Place'. Co-supervised with Alex Niven and Jane Macnaughton (Durham University), this project will draw on Darling's published and unpublished writings to ask how she tracked sickness and health across both individual and civic bodies.  Through a series of semi-structured recorded interviews, Tamzin will also document Darling's creative practice, which involved pioneering work with clinicians - including the founding of Operating Theatre - and partnerships with Live Theatre, Northern Stage, and New Writing North.    

In addition to supervising the critical component of a number of Creative Writing PhDs, Anne has supervised doctoral projects in Literature that include the following topics:

  • Complicity and Failures of Witnessing in Kazuo Ishiguro and W. G. Sebald
  • Humour in British Writing of the First World War
  • Trauma in Cypriot Children's Literature Since 1974
  • Literary and Cinematic Representations of Political Torture from Algiers to Guantanamo
  • Coming of Age in Contemporary Fictions of the First World War
  • Trauma and Wordsworth's Poetry
  • Towards Decolonisation in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
  • Representing the Holocaust in Contemporary American Women's Fiction


Publications