Centre for Health Humanities

How did monsters help unlock the secrets of life?
2023-08-24 18:30 - 20:00 (Europe/London) | The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BS, United Kingdom
Monsters have existed in literature and science for centuries, but they’re more than just a source of fear. They also act as a crucial key to unlocking the mysteries of life.
Join Professor of Victorian Literature, Andrew Mangham, as he traces the development of the idea of monsters from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Comte de Buffon’s natural history, and Hugo de Vries’ mutation theory.
Discover how these ground-breaking thinkers challenged traditional notions of normality and helped lay the foundation for modern biology and genetics. Uncover the connections between literature, science, and the changing perception of monsters, and how this sheds light on the significance of body difference and diversity in the natural world. And do it all in the very same Theatre where Mary Shelley got ideas for her seminal book!
Through his in-depth analysis of the works of these innovative thinkers, Andrew reveals the transformative power of monsters and their role in shaping our understanding of life.
Copies of Andrew’s latest book, We Are All Monsters: How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us, are available to purchase after the talk.
Book via the Royal Institution website.

In the Company of Monsters: New Visions, Ancient Myths
2023-09-23 - 2024-02-24 | Reading Museum, Blagrave Street, Reading, RG1 1HQ, United Kingdom
Free exhibition
23 September 2023 – 24 February 2024
Reading Museum
In the Company of Monsters: New Visions, Ancient Myths will be an exhibition of the works of the contemporary artists Eleanor Crook and Paul Reid, alongside objects, texts, and artworks from the University of Reading and Reading Museum. Brought together for the first time, these detailed and striking works share an interest in retelling ancient myths of body difference, diversity, and hybridity. Inspired by the enduring dreams, or nightmares, of bodily ‘otherness’, the weird and wonderful creatures portrayed in this unique exhibition will ask vital questions about humanity’s place in nature, the biological and artistic meanings of diversity and difference, and the vital role that history plays in our understandings of the dynamic workings of natural history.
Eleanor Crook is a British sculptor with a special interest in mortality, anatomy and pathology, who exhibits internationally in fine art and medical and science museum contexts. She studied Classics and Philosophy at Oxford before training in sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools in the early 90s, where she specialised in wax modeling, lost wax bronze casting and other lifelike media. She pieced together a knowledge of Anatomy from London’s medical museums and the dissection room as a medical artist, finding figurative art to be not in favour at the time; even so, her Classical background meant that communing with statues, and therefore the body, were second nature. Crook considers her work ‘more effigy than statue’, as they are imbued with a convincing sense of life. She has developed close, long-term collaborations with medical museums and historic anatomical wax collections such as the Gordon Museum of Pathology, Guy’s Hospital, Ghent University Museum, and the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam, where she continues wax modeling traditions and combines research through human dissection and studying the history of anatomical model-making. Most recently, she has worked with museum project partners on creating a genre of anatomical Expressionism, uncanny yet rooted in medical investigation, mythology, and the mysteries of the mind. To learn more about Eleanor Crook, her work, and find selected art for sale, visit https://www.eleanorcrook.net

Paul Reid was born in Scone, Perth, in 1975. Between 1994 and 1998, he studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, where he obtained First Class honours in drawing and painting. Since then his work has been part of a number of major exhibitions, in Scotland and northern England in particular, but also in Europe. He has accompanied the then Prince of Wales on visits to Italy, Turkey, Jordan and Canada, drawing and painting the landscapes and people encountered. He is firmly established as an artist who combines technical mastery with striking new visions of ancient myths. On the face of it, Reid’s work is traditional in medium (oil; charcoal), though he has more recently moved into the use of digital technology. Within the traditional aesthetic, however, lies a world of the unexpected: uncanny hybrids of human and animal; juxtapositions of ancient myths with modern landscapes, faces, buildings. Central to every work is storytelling: characters from Greek mythology are caught at tense moments in their narrative, at some point of shocked discovery or on the very edge of violence; or else they pause in strange stillness, allowed a moment’s repose even as the next (perhaps final) act of the mythical drama impends. The seated Minotaur is a perfect example: he sits easily, casually, but the ancient story dictates what is shortly to befall him. To work with ancient myths is to work with stories that have been told and retold for millennia. This is not to say that they cannot be reshaped; they always have been. Reid’s reshapings are subtle, but they leave the viewer in no doubt that ancient men, women, monsters and gods have a place in the modern world as they did in the distant world that first created them.To learn more about Paul Reid and his work, and find selected art for sale, visit: https://www.paulreidart.co.uk/

Making Mutants: How and Why We Break Genes on Purpose
2023-10-10 18:00 - 20:00 | Reading Museum, Blagrave Street, Reading, RG1 1HQ, United Kingdom
Making Mutants: How and Why We Break Genes on Purpose
Location: Reading Museum
10 October 2023, 6pm.
Join Dr Louise Johnson from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Reading to explore how mutation in genetic research is helping to identify and understand the building blocks of life.

Sensation or Science? Monsters Ancient and Modern
2023-11-07 18:00 - 20:00 | Reading Museum, Blagrave Street, Reading, RG1 1HQ, United Kingdom
Sensation or Science? Monsters Ancient and Modern
Location: Reading Museum
7 November 2023, 6pm
Join Professors Emma Aston and Andrew Mangham from the University of Reading to explore how Classical myths worked their way into the monster science and monster stories of the modern period.

Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity
2023-11-25 15:00 - 17:00 | Reading Museum, Blagrave Street, Reading, RG1 1HQ, United Kingdom
Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity
Location: Reading Museum
25 November 2023, 3pm
Video games seem to teach us that monsters must be fought and can be defeated. Join Dr Jarosłav Švelch from Charles University in Prague to explore how this came to be. Do games offer potential for more nuanced representations of monstrosity?

Under the Bed and Among the Dead: Monsters in Ancient Egypt
2023-12-05 18:00 - 20:00 | Reading Museum, Blagrave Street, Reading, RG1 1HQ, United Kingdom
Under the Bed and Among the Dead: Monsters in Ancient Egypt
Location: Reading Museum
5 December 2023, 6pm
Learn from Dr Jordan Miller from the University of Cambridge about the fearsome qualities of some famous (and lesser-known) supernatural beings from ancient Egypt, the situations in which ancient Egyptians encountered them, and whether we might call them monsters.

CHH online seminar series
2025-03-05 08:00 - 2025-05-31 17:00 | Online
To get a Teams link to the seminars, email chh@reading.ac.uk
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) (TBD)
