Louise Kenward interviews Clare Best about her multimedia project Breastless, published online recently as part of ‘Life Writing Projects’, a joint project between The Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research and REFRAME at the University of Sussex. In Breastless, Best traces her experiences of risk-reducing bilateral mastectomy through prose, a sequence of poems […]
Latest articles
Book Review: Brilliant Imperfection
Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017, 240 pages, £70. Reviewed by Dr. Sue Smith Brilliant Imperfection is an elegant addition to the current topical debate concerning disability and cure written by disabled, transgender activist, Eli Clare. Combining personal memoir and acute observation with critical disability […]
Exploring Disability in Film
Our film and media correspondent, Dr Khalid Ali, reports on the London Film Festival which takes place from the 4th to the 15th of October 2017. Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian director, once said that ‘art portrays the desire of human beings to achieve a balance between their materialistic needs and moral standards’. The attitudes of […]
Empathy and Affect in Medical and Theatrical Practice: Sophocles, Beckett, Edson
Empathy and Affect in Medical and Theatrical Practice will be a two-day event on the 14th to the 15th of October at the University of Warwick. The event will bring together theatre practitioners, clinicians, and scholars in humanities and medical ethics with other members of the public to consider the embodiment of illness (both physical and […]
Through a Shattered Lens
By Rebecca Marshall How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything. There will always be a line, a phrase; threads of words which hook onto you. For me, it was Arundhati Roy’s words above (in her latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness) that weaved their […]
Conference Report: Empathies
‘Empathies: 11th Conference of the European Society for Literature and the Arts’, Basel University, 20-25th June 2017 By Anna McFarlane The ESLA conferences have been growing for a number of years, working alongside their sister organisation in America, the Society for Literature and the Arts to promote interdisciplinary communication through wide-ranging conferences that take one […]
Wellcome Trust-funded Research Posts
Three new research posts have been announced for the project ‘People Like You’, a 4-year Wellcome Trust-supported Collaborative Project in the Medical Humanities awarded to Professors Sophie Day (Goldsmiths, Anthropology), Celia Lury (Warwick University, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies) and Helen Ward (Imperial College London, School of Public Health). It aims to establish the cultural significance […]
Fleeing a Spider’s Web
Enemy, directed by Denis Villeneuve, Canada-Spain, 2013 Reviewed by Dr Franco Ferrarini, Gastroenterologist and Film Reviewer Adapted from Josè Saramago’s novel The Double, Enemy is an intriguing film directed by Denis Villeneuve. The film narrative employs multiple metaphors, embedded in a dream-like environment, which may be difficult to notice or fully understand at first […]
Conference Reports: Accounts of Illness in Historical and Modern Texts
‘Accounts of Illness in Historical and Modern Texts: Exploring Methods in Medical Humanities Research Across the Disciplines’, University of Oxford, 27th June 2017 By Anna McFarlane The ‘Accounts of Illness’ conference was organised by Professor Katherine Southwood of Oxford University as a means of understanding the different methodologies used across the disciplines that intersect in […]
Book Review: The Cognitive Humanities
Garratt, Peter., editor. The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture edited by Peter Garratt, London: Palgrave, 2016. xvii + 259 pages, £66.99. Reviewed by David Rodriguez, Stony Brook University It is a difficult task to collect work in a coherent introductory volume for a field as diverse, divisive, and multi-disciplinary as […]