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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, life writing, and poetry; the intersections between creative and critical writing; medical humanities; memory studies, and the contemporary representation of grief and mourning. 


Internal Roles

Anne is Director of Research for the School of English. She is also co-ordinating the REF2029 submission for English Literature and Creative Writing.

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. 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 BSc. Medical Humanities program 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. 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. Combining critical and textual analysis with personal reflection, Anne examines the days, months, and years following a death by suicide. This pivoting of attention to what happens in the wake of suicide brings to light the often-surprising ways in which suicide is woven into the everyday places that we inhabit, and in which it is related to all of us, albeit with varying degrees of proximity and kinship. You can learn more about the book here.


    

Research Profile

Anne's research has been animated by the question of how we both relate, and relate to, stories that are difficult to tell. She started in the field of trauma studies, asking in Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) how contemporary novelists represent traumatic experience. She co-edited with J. J. Long the first collection of essays on W. G. Sebald to be published in English, examining the complexities of this writer's relationship to German and broader colonial histories. In her monograph Memory: New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2008), Anne traced the longer history of our relation of, and to, the past, and this work was accompanied by the co-edited volume Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

More recently Anne has worked in the field of the medical humanities, with a particular interest in narratives of illness and loss. She co-edited with Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and she focused on empathy's relation to medicine in her monograph Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

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


    

Engaged Research 

Anne's research expertise has informed a range of projects that collaborate with different publics.

With the support of the Catherine Cookson Foundation, Anne worked with David de la Haye in 2023-24 to create a sound work that documents the grassroots memorial site in a stand of trees near the Angel of the North. 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 find out more about the project here, and you can listen to the sound piece here.

Anne also worked with parents who had lost a baby from a multiple pregnancy, making a short, animated film about this complex form of grief. This project was a collaboration with Judith Rankin (Professor of Maternal and Child Health, Newcastle University), artist Kate Sweeney, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, and the Tiny Lives Trust. The project was the recipient of the Newcastle University Engagement and Place Award for Health, Wellbeing and Societal Benefit in 2023. You can learn more about the collaboration and watch the film here.

Anne was also Project Lead 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. This project drew on Anne's research expertise in trauma narratives to build capacity for adult-facing exhibitions at Seven Stories. The project was the recipient of the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Award for Knowledge Exchange Project of the Year, 2017, and was commended by the judges as 'an exemplar of how a School of English can engage in knowledge exchange'. It formed part of an Impact Case Study in REF2021. 





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