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Staff Profile

Professor Anne Whitehead

Prof of Modern & Contemporary Literature

Background

Background

Anne has worked at Newcastle University since she was appointed as a lecturer in 1999. 

Anne has research and teaching interests in contemporary fiction and poetry, the intersections between creative and critical writing, medical humanities, memory studies, and the literary representation of grief and mourning. 


Internal Roles

Anne is Director of Research for the School of English.

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 (2017-26) 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 and a member of the Memory Studies Association. She sits on the international advisory board of the Centre for Women's Mental Health at Uppsala University in Sweden, as well as 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 (2020-23) and on the BSc. Medical Humanities programme at Glasgow University (2023-27).


Google Scholar Profile: Click here.


Research

Current Research

Anne's monograph, Relating Suicide, has been published with Bloomsbury Press (Academic), as one of the first publications in the Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities series. You can read more about the book here.

With the support of the Catherine Cookson Foundation, Anne will work with David de la Haye in 2023-24 to create a sound work that focuses on the grassroots memorial site in a copse of trees near the Angel of the North. You can find out more about the project here

    

Research Profile

Anne has written the monograph Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction: An Intervention in Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 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).

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

    

Engaged Research 

Anne worked with Lucy Pearson and Jessica Medhurst on an Innovate UK/AHRC funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children's Books. The project was the recipient of the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Award for Knowledge Exchange Project of the Year, 2017.  

Anne has collaborated with Judith Rankin (Professor of Maternal and Child Health, Newcastle University), artist Kate Sweeney, and the Tiny Lives Trust. Working with parents who have lost a baby from a multiple pregnancy, we made a short, animated film about this complicated form of grief. You can learn more about the project here.




Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

Anne lectures on the stage 1 module Transformations and contributes lectures and seminars 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 co-runs with Vicky Long 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. She is 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 Alex Niven 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