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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, trauma and grief. 


Internal Roles

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

Anne previously held the roles of Deputy Head of the School and Director of Impact (2017-2021) and Director of Postgraduate Research (2013-2016). She was Acting Director of the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership in 2015-16.

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 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.  


Google Scholar Profile: Click here.


Research

Current Research

Anne's monograph, Relating Suicide, has been 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. Departing from the prevailing narrativization of suicide in terms of why it happened, Anne turns instead to the questions of when, how and where, calling attention to suicide's materiality as well as its materialization.  You can read more about the book in this blog post.

Anne has an article on elegies of maternal loss forthcoming in the Spring 2023 issue of Literature and Medicine (special issue: 'Disrupting Narrative: Translating Chronic Pain', ed. Sara Wasson). She is also writing a chapter on grief for Madness in Literature and Visual Culture: Critical Interventions (ed. Anna Harpin, Bloomsbury Academic).

    

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

Anne's monographs have been translated into Chinese and Japanese. Anne's article on Never Let Me Go was included in a Japanese critical anthology on Kazuo Ishiguro, and a Spanish translation of her essay on Tony Harrison's Gulf War poems has been published alongside Harrison's 'A Cold Coming' and 'Initial Illumination' and Fernando Beltran's El Gallo de Bagdad (Centro de Documentacion Critica/ Libro Corrientes, 2022). 

    

Engaged Research 

Anne is currently collaborating with Judith Rankin (Professor of Maternal and Child Health, Newcastle University), Nicholas Embleton (Consultant Neonatal Paediatrician, Royal Victoria Infirmary), film-maker Kate Sweeney and the Tiny Lives Trust. The project works with parents who have lost a baby from a multiple pregnancy to make a short, animated film about their experiences, and to ask how their complicated grief might be communicated to others.   

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 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.  




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