Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Cathy, Jason and Phil about Personalised and public health: learning (and not learning) from the past. Our guests share a research interest around public health, personalised health, the politics of health, but have different disciplinary training. During the conversation, we tease out some of the similarities but also differences between past and present, and a humanities versus biomedical approach. We explore what can we learn from each other across disciplinary approaches, and from the past to inform approaches to population health today.

Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research ranges from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century, and moves between poetry, prose, and drama. It also includes less obviously “literary” forms of writing, such as medical or educational works. That range is exemplified by the monograph on dialogue that she is currently completing for Oxford University Press.

Jason Gill is Professor of Cardiometabolic Health at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on the role of lifestyle-related factors (principally physical activity, diet and sleep) in the prevention and management of cardiometabolic diseases, and on ethnicity and health. This work encompasses epidemiology; biological mechanisms underpinning cardiometabolic disease risk; and development of realistic and sustainable lifestyle interventions. He also established the MSc in Sport and Exercise Science & Medicine at the University of Glasgow, has contributed to national clinical and physical activity guidelines, is an editor at several journals, and plays an active role in public engagement and communication of science.

Phil Withington is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. A specialist in early modern history (1500-1800), he has a long-term interest in medical humanities in general and the history of intoxicants and addiction in particular. He is currently writing a book on England’s first psychoactive revolution and running a project on craft alcohol and urban environments.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Martina about appliedness and medical education, medical humanities and (the lack of) defined disciplinary identity, and how the medical humanities interact with multiple academic disciplines in research and teaching.

Martina King studied medicine, German literature and philosophy in Munich and qualified as paediatrician. After 15 years of clinical paediatrics and some years of teaching modern German literature, she turned to medical humanities: she lectured medical history in Glasgow and Bern, wrote her second book on the cultural and literary history of German bacteriology and became professor of medical humanities at Fribourg University in 2018. Her current research interests are medical spaces in modern literature and culture, and the medical discharge report as factual narrative genre.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Stella and Neil about Care. Key themes include: the place of self-care in contemporary writing and medical humanities; theories of care in the medical humanities and further afield; the relationship of care to narratives of illness and disability; care deficits and the long shadow that they cast in illness narratives.

Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities in the School of Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Health and Medical Humanities at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Brill/Rodopi, 2011) and of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). She has also co-edited Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) and has led “Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities”, an interdisciplinary project that examined how books, art and healthcare can be interrelated. Current research includes a practice-based project that uses creative methods inspired by the artist’s book to explore the experiences of mothers affected by historic and contemporary practices of child removal and adoption, and a new monograph on self-care in contemporary writing.

Prof Neil Vickers is professor of English literature and the health humanities at King’s College London. He’s currently on a senior research fellowship funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust to write a history of the medical humanities from the early 1960s to the present day. He’s had two careers, one in epidemiology and public health and one in literature and he tried to bring them together in his work. He is the author of Coleridge and the Doctors (2004) and Being Ill : On Sickness, Care and Abandonment (2024).

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Ben andJohn about Queer Medical Humanities. Key themes include:queer inclusivity in hospitals and hospital design, knowledge in healthcare and, issues of healthcare delivery, queer methodologies for healthcare futures andpoliticisation of health and queer healthcare.

Dr Benjamin Dalton is Lecturer in French Studies in theSchool of Global Affairs at Lancaster University. He works at the intersections of French Studies and the Medical Humanities, exploring how contemporary Frenchand Francophone literature, film and philosophy dialogue with biomedical science and different healthcare contexts. His current work maps contemporary philosophical approaches to the hospital, and he has published on newconceptions for clinical environments emerging in the works of Catherine Malabou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paul B. Preciado, and Anne Dufourmantelle. He has a particular interest in LGBTQIA+ inclusivity in healthcare and hospital design,and is currently working on a project about queering the hospital.

Dr John Gilmore (he/they) is a Registered General Nurse,Assistant Professor and Head of General Nursing at University College Dublin, where his work focuses on intersections of health and social justice. John isalso a Fulbright scholar and has held visiting positions at University of California San Francisco, Columbia University and University of Huddersfield.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Luna and Will about shame. Key themes include: understanding shame, the role shame can play at work and shame competence.

Luna Dolezal is Professor of Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. She has been researching shame for over 15 years, and is PI of the Shame and Medicine Project (2020-2025), funded by the Wellcome Trust, and was PI of the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 Project (2020-2022),funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Luna has developed training in ‘shame competence’ in collaboration with the Devon &Cornwall Police, and worked with Will Bynum to set up The Shame Lab. See Luna’s University of Exeter Staff Profile here.

Will Bynum is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and and a veteran of the United States Air Force. He received his M.D. at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in 2010 and Ph.D. in Health Professions Education at Maastricht University in the Netherlands in 2023, where defended his thesis entitled “Out of the shadows: a qualitative exploration of shame in medical learners.” Along with Luna, he is a co-creator of The Shame Space, a global consortium that advances open communication about the role of shame in healthcare, a co-producer on the award winning “Shame in Medicine” podcast series produced by The Nocturnists, and a co-founder of The Shame Lab, which catalyzes research and training to advance shame competence in healthcare and beyond. He is the author of over 30peer-reviewed publications and has given over 150 workshops and presentations to top hospitals, conferences, and organizations such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, and the American Hospital Association. He has received numerous awards for his research including Best Paper by the AAMC Research in Medical Education Committee in 2021 and Best Doctoral Report by the Association of Medical Educators of Europe in 2023.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Ria and Stuart about Uncertainty. Key themes include: imposter syndrome and participation in academic/institutional culture; pressures of speaking with authority; precarityand career development; the uncertainty of the current HE environment; vulnerability and humility as research positions; generative possibilities of uncertainty as a critical tool; uncertainty and anxiety; and disciplinary uncertainty.

Stuart Murray is Professor of ContemporaryLiteratures and Film in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where he was the Founding Director of the Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities. He haswritten six monographs and edited/co-edited five collections on topics ranging across postcolonial literatures and film, disability representation, embodiedtechnologies, and wider depictions of health. His most recent book is Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines, published by Bloomsbury in 2023 and he has just started a new research project on Sleep and Modernism.

Ria Cheyne was a Senior Lecturer in Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University until April 2024, when she tookvoluntary severance from her permanent position. She is now a fixed term researcher on the Disabled Researchers Network project at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research interests include genre fiction, neurodiversity, and representations of disability and health. Her monograph, Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction (LiverpoolUniversity Press, 2019) is available open access. She identifies as a literature scholar, a disability studies scholar, and/or a medical humanities scholar depending on the time of day.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Dr Arya Thampuran and Prof Sarah de Leeuw about decolonizing our practices. Key themes include: decolonial practice in academic spaces (non-extractive methodologies and representational labour); capitalism and extractive decontextualization; depoliticization of indigenous knowledges and practices; feminist queer-informed anti-colonial methodologies; critical poetics; medical education; and rural, remote, northern, and marginalized geographies.

Dr Arya Thampuran is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University and co-lead of the Black Health and the Humanities Network in her day job, and a yoga instructor pre-sunrise/post-sunset. These roles capture her interests in mental health and healing, engaging with communal knowledges and practices around wellbeing. Her work is broadly situated at the intersection of the medical humanities and critical race studies; she is interested in how creative practitioners in contemporary African diasporic contexts express distress and healing, in ways that re-script prevailing psychiatric narratives of illness and wellness. Principally, her work is committed to a decolonial and intersectional approach.

Sarah de Leeuw, a Professor and Canada Research Chair (Humanities and Health Inequities) with the Northern Medical Program (a distributed site of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine) is an award-winning researcher, creative writer (poetry and literary non-fiction), and multidisciplinary scholar studying why some people and places have better health than others. Trained as a historical-cultural geographer, de Leeuw’s research, activism, and creative practices have for more than 30 years focused on anticolonial, feminist, and queer-informed understandings of overlooked people, communities, and geographies. She grew up in Haida Gwaii and Terrace (Kitsumkalum territory) and now divides her time between Lheidli T’enneh/Dakelh Territory (Prince George) and Syilx Territory (Okanagan Centre).

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Dr Gavin Miller and Dr Anna McFarlane about their work on science fiction and the medical humanities. Gavin and Anna explain what science fiction has to offer the medical humanities, and how science fiction shapes our understanding of the future of healthcare, when the line between healthcare and biological enhancement could become increasingly blurry. They also share what they have learned in the process of editing The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities with Dr Donna McCormack.

Gavin Miller is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow. His recent publications include Science Fiction and Psychology (LUP, 2020) and Miracles of Healing: Psychotherapy and Religion in Twentieth-Century Scotland (EUP, 2020). He is co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities, and his latest project is an investigation of UFO practices in post-war Scotland.

Anna McFarlane is a Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds and author of the monograph Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades (2021). Her current research was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and focuses on traumatic pregnancy and its expression in fantastika. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, and the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities.