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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.  

At Faculty level, Anne sits on the steering committee of the Newcastle University Medical Humanities Network. She acts as a mentor in the Newcastle University Mentor Scheme and she is a reviewer for the Faculty Peer Review College.


External Roles and Recognition

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. 

Anne is currently an external examiner on the MA in Medical Humanities: Bodies, Cultures and Ideas at Birkbeck, University of London (2020-24). 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, Australia, Singapore, and Finland.  

Anne has presented invited keynote and plenary lectures at a variety of national and international venues, including the Conference of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, the University of Mainz, the University of Vienna, Ghent University, the University of Leuven, and the Sorbonne.  


Research

Research Interests

Most recently, Anne has written the monograph Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction: An Intervention in Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Here she argues that empathy is not something that we have (or lack) but something that we do. 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. Reviewers have commented that 'Whitehead's book should be required reading for all those engaged in the medical humanities' (Medical Health Humanities) and that 'Whitehead's new book models the ways that interdisciplinary scholarship, written under the aegis of the medical humanities, can address profound questions of human connection' (Contemporary Literature).    

Anne has 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 W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion with J. J. Long (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Her articles have been published in Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature and Textual Practice. She co-edited a special issue of Feminist Theory on feminism and affect with Carolyn Pedwell (2012).  

Anne is currently writing a monograph, Relating Suicide, which is contracted to Bloomsbury's Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities series.


Doctoral Supervision

Anne is an experienced supervisor of doctoral projects and welcomes applications in all areas of her expertise. She was Director of Postgraduate Studies for the School of English (2013-16) and she acted as Interim Director of the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Consortium (2015-16).

Anne is currently supervising the critical component for Toby Martinez de las Rivas' 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. 

Past PhD students include:

Ivan Stacy, who looked at complicity in the writing of W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro (co-supervised with John Beck). Ivan is Associate Professor at Beijing Normal University and he has published the monograph The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction (2021).

Alex Lockwood worked with Anne on theories of affect for the critical component of his Creative Writing PhD. Alex is currently Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Sunderland and he has published the novel The Chernobyl Privileges (2019).


Engagement and Impact 

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. 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, with a view to embedding 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, and it was commended by the judging panel as 'an exemplar of how a School of English could engage in knowledge exchange'. 



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.

 

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.



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

 


Publications