Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Professor Anne Whitehead

Prof of Modern & Contemporary Literature

Background

Background

I am a professor of English Literature at Newcastle University, where 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. My research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, medical humanities, and memory and trauma studies. 


In the School of English, I am the Director of Research and I will be co-ordinating the REF2029 submission for English Literature and Creative Writing.


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. Moreover, 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 interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, with a particular focus on the medical humanities and memory and trauma studies. Much of my work is animated by the question of how we relate, and relate to, stories that are difficult to tell.


My study Trauma Fiction asked how a range of contemporary novelists represent traumatic experiences. Alongside writing this book, I co-edited the first collection of essays on German writer W. G. Sebald to be published in English. My next book, Memory: New Critical Idiom, traced the longer history of our relation of, and to, the past, and I co-edited alongside it Theories of Memory: A Reader. I have published articles on a range of contemporary writers, but I have returned particularly to British authors Pat Barker and Kazuo Ishiguro.


I co-edited the landmark Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, which sought to ground the field within a critical framework as well as to engage it with structural questions relating to health and inequalities. My book Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction took empathy as a key concept for the medical humanities, and asked how contemporary novelists illuminate the ways in which its integration into medicine can reinforce existing hierarchies. My most recent book, Relating Suicide, combined critical and textual analysis with personal reflection, to examine the days, weeks, and months following a suicide. My close attention to what happens in the wake of suicide brought to light the often surprising ways in which suicide is woven into the everyday places that we inhabit, and is related to all of us, albeit with differing degrees of proximity.


My research has involved working collaboratively and in partnership. In 2017, I was a recipient of the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Award for Knowledge Exchange Project of the Year. Working in partnership with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children's Books, the project team built capacity for adult-facing exhibitions at Seven Stories and supported the curation of the exhibition Michael Morpurgo: A Lifetime in Stories. I received a Newcastle University Engagement and Place Award for Health, Wellbeing and Societal Benefit in 2023, for a project that worked in collaboration with Judith Rankin and the Neonatal Unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary. We co-created a short, animated film with parents who had lost a baby from a multiple pregnancy, seeking to enable better understanding of this complex form of grief. Most recently, I worked with sound artist David de la Haye in 2023-24 to create a sound work that documented the grassroots memorial at the Angel of the North in Gateshead. The sound piece brings into conversation interviews that capture the stories of people who have left memorial tributes at the Angel, sound recordings of the site across the seasons, and the 'voice' of the Angel itself. The project featured in The Guardian, and Radio 4's Today and Sunday programs.


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.

 

Postgraduate Teaching

I contribute a session to the MA Research Methods training module and I supervise MA dissertations.


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 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