Blog

Josefina Bravo and Sue Walker Since December 2020, the approach to testing for COVID in the UK has shifted from self-administered home testing to mass testing in community sites. This means that going forward, an ever-expanding number of people will be training to deliver testing at their place... Read more »

Not everyone can afford to be anxious about Coronavirus – some are more concerned about managing their long-term ailments. Amie Bolissian provides a historical perspective on this tendency, drawing on her Wellcome Trust-funded research on older people’s illness experiences in early modern England. An old woman falling asleep over reading... Read more »

Co-Director of the Centre for Health Humanities, Dr Hannah Newton, draws on 17th-century plague accounts to offer insights into the emotional impact of self-isolation Yesterday, the British government announced its policy for slowing down the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) infection: ‘if you think you have symptoms’ of this disease, ‘stay at home... Read more »

Dr Ranjita Dhital, Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice (University of Reading), Principal Investigator of ‘Architecture of Pharmacies – Co-designing Pharmacy Spaces’: Pharmacy Research UK Leverhulme Fellowship (2018-2020), £44,972. Pharmacy, Damien Hurst (Tate Modern) Architecture of Pharmacies is an interdisciplinary arts-based research project which aims to understand how the physical and social spaces within... Read more »

Dr Laura Carnelos, Collections Research Assistant in Typography & Graphic Communication at Reading, draws on her postdoctoral work at the University of Venice to illuminate the experience of a famous blind author, Luigi Groto Luigi Groto (1541-1585), also known as the cieco d’Adria, was the most famous blind author of sixteenth-century... Read more »

This workshop, organised by Dr Rohan Deb Roy (co-director of the University of Reading’s Centre for Health Humanities), examines how biomedicine was received, reinterpreted and transformed in the non-western world in the twentieth century. Through case studies focussing on India, Palestine, China and Africa, it traces the various ways in which... Read more »

Dr Marjorie Gehrhardt, lecturer in 20th century French history, tells us about a recent event she organised on experiences and representations of facial differences. From The Phantom of the Opera to James Bond villains and The Undateables, visible facial differences are still overwhelmingly presented as signs of moral or intellectual flaws. On... Read more »

On the 7 and 8 November, the Centre for Health Humanities teamed up the University’s Arts Strategy, and was supported generously by the Heritage and Creativity Institute for Collections, in its running of a special workshop ‘On the fabric of the human body’. The event was organised around two gems... Read more »

University of Reading Conference, 1-2 July 2020   [Please note that the original dates for this conference were 3-4 July 2019, but one of the conference organisers has since found out she is expecting a baby, and will be on maternity leave in the summer of 2019, hence the new dates] ‘O... Read more »

Amie Bolissian Mcrae provides a tantalising glimpse into the subject of her new Wellcome Trust-funded PhD project, ‘The Aged Patient in Early Modern England’. The PhD builds on her MA dissertation, which was awarded the Royal Historical Society’s Rees Davies Prize for the best MA dissertation in the whole of the UK! Jan Lievens,... Read more »