Latest
2025 CHH seminar series
We’re pleased to announce the 2025 seminar series, with a line-up of talks from all aspects of the medical humanities.
All seminars are online via Teams – email chh@reading.ac.uk for a link.
26 February 2025: Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh (King’s College London), ‘“Important, bold and brave”: Doing public engagement with sensitive historical research’
26 March 2025: Dr Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril (University of Sheffield)
9 April 2025: Dr Janet Weston (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), ‘Immoral, unjust, and simply ruining the nation: public health law and public fury in post-war Britain’
23 April 2025: Dr Ailise Bulfin and Giulia Scapin (University College Dublin), ‘Investigating fictional representations of child sexual abuse and using the Shared Reading method to work with people with difficult lived experiences’
14 May 2025: Dr Clare Hickman (Newcastle University)
- In the Company of Monsters: New Visions, Ancient MythsFree exhibition 23 September 2023 – 24 February 2024 Reading Museum ‘Stare Long into the Abyss (Marsyas)’ by Eleanor Crook ‘Circe’ by Paul Reid In the Company of Monsters: New Visions, Ancient Myths will be an exhibition of the works of the contemporary artists Eleanor Crook and Paul... Read more »
- Ensuring confidence and accuracy in COVID testing through effective instructionsJosefina 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 »
- Coping with chronic conditions during coronavirus: A historical perspectiveNot 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 »
- Home & Alone: A historical perspective on self-isolation during coronavirus by Hannah NewtonCo-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 »
- Architecture of Pharmacies – Co-designing Pharmacy SpacesDr 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 »
- Luigi Groto: A blind author and prophet in sixteenth-century Italy, by Laura CarnelosDr 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 »
- Call for Participants: Global Health Humanities WorkshopThis 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 »
- Facial Prejudice: the Last Taboo? By Marjorie GehrhardtDr 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 »
- Workshop on the fabric of the human bodyOn 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 »
- Call for Papers: Disease & Ease, 1500-1800University 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 »