A&H Staff Conducting Health Related Research

The Faculty has around forty academic staff engaged in health-related research. In addition, a great deal of research in the Faculty falls under a wider rubric of 'Arts and Humanities as Health'

Arts and Sciences

Prof Helen Chatterjee
h.chatterjee@ucl.ac.uk
I have a number of research project focused on arts, nature and health, and social prescribing: https://culturehealthresearch.wordpress.com/. I am Programme Director for the new MASc in Creative Health. All of our research programmes use an interdisciplinary approach including mixed quantitative and qualitative methods drawn from across arts, humanities and sciences: specifically we use self report psychological wellbeing methods, ethnography and other qualitative methods and creative arts-based methods. Prior to setting up the MASc in Creative health I conceived and taught two BASc modules: “Arts, Nature and Wellbeing” and “Object Lessons.”

Dr Ranjita Dhital
r.dhital@ucl.ac.uk
My public health research is informed by creative and participatory methodologies. My research is applying arts and community-based approaches to reduce alcohol harm and promote mental wellbeing in high- and low-income countries. I’m also using creative Participatory Action Research and Experience-based Co-design methods to optimise community pharmacy spaces (PRUK Leverhulme Fellowship) – The Architecture of Pharmacies.
I’m a registered pharmacist. I have received research grants and other funding from NIHR, GCRF, Arts Council England (ACE), Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charitable Trust (GSTT), Pharmacy Research UK (PRUK, Leverhulme Fellowships) and North West London-Central London Research Network. I founded and lead the ‘Creative Nepal: Arts-Health Community’ and the ‘International Arts in Pharmacy SIG’. I Chair the ‘Royal Society for Public Health’s Arts Health and Wellbeing’ and co-lead the 'Neurodiversity In/& Creative Research Network'. I am Editorial Board Member of Perspectives in Public Health.

Prof Tim Jordan
t.jordan@ucl.ac.uk
I oversee a range of health teaching in BASc. There is in particularly the MASC Creative Health and a number of staff (Thomas Kador and new member arriving in June Ranjita Dhittal) who work in health. We also work closely with Prof Helen Chatterjee who is from Biosciences and BASc. Much of our teaching falls under health from an interdisciplinarity that mixes humanities, arts, social sciences and sciences.

Helen Jury
helen.jury.16@ucl.ac.uk
My research is on the touch and handling of materials and objects in Art Psychotherapy as a distinctive therapeutic medium. I work clinically in Student Services, MA clinical trainings, and other population groups. On the MASC in Creative Health, I work with the students exploring the importance of therapeutic boundaries as opposed to working clinically in therapy. I supervise Allied Health Professionals working in mental health charities, museum work, peri and postnatal, childhood trauma, and adult acute. Recent book publications include: 'Art Therapy in Museums and Galleries: Reframing Practice' and 'Art Psychotherapy and Innovation: New territories, techniques and technologies'.

Dr Thomas Kador
t.kador@ucl.ac.uk
I lead the SMaRteN-funded, SWELS project on Student Wellbeing and Experiential Learning Spaces.Read a summary of the a range of ongoing and recent research projects on the intersection of arts & health: https://culturehealthresearch.wordpress.com We have just published and edited volume on Object-based Learning and Wellbeing (Kador and Chatterjee 2021), which builds on our research investigating the health and wellbeing impacts of the arts and other cultural activities.

Dr Wendy Sims-Schouten
w.sims-schouten@ucl.ac.uk
I have a specific interest in interdisciplinary research with a focus on historic and contemporary practices around health, wellbeing and safeguarding of marginalised/disadvantaged groups, including child refugees/migrants, young care leavers, homeless people and children/young people from ethnic minority communities, in national and international contexts (England, Scotland, Netherlands, Egypt, Canada, Indonesia); I have also researched issues around mental health literacy in HE. My work centralises voices and coproduction and has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, Research England, NIHR, as well as charities and Portsmouth City Council. I am Co-Editor of the British Psychological Society Journal “Psychology Teaching Review” and Chair of the Editorial Board for Children & Society.

Dr Linda Thomson
linda.thomson@ucl.ac.uk
I am a Cognitive Psychologist and Senior Research Fellow specialising in participatory and mixed methods evaluation. I led the research for the AHRC-funded ‘Museums on Prescription’ project, achieving several industry awards. I developed the UCL Creative Wellbeing Measures for assessing the benefits of cultural, heritage, and nature-based activities on the mental health and wellbeing on a wide range of participants. I am currently employed on the UKRI ‘Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities’ programme working with Prof Helen Chatterjee and the Culture Nature Health Research Group: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/biosciences/culture-nature-health-research/. Specific research interests include the role of creativite and co-productive processes in enhancing health and wellbeing, and the value of object-based learning and multi-sensory engagement.

English

Prof Helen Hackett
h.hackett@ucl.ac.uk
I have recently published a monograph (Yale UP) called The Elizabethan Mind. This explores Elizabethan theories of the mind, and how the mind was represented in the literature of the period. It includes chapters on relations between mind and body (including the humours, melancholy, and the passions), on demonic possession, on the imagination and dreams, and on literary representations of psychology, subjectivity, and cognition. The book mostly aims to make readers more aware of the distance of Elizabethan ideas about the mind from our own, but an Epilogue considers some surprising points of similarity.

Dr Beth Malory
b.malory@ucl.ac.uk
I conduct research into the linguistics of health communication.

Hebrew and Jewish Studies

Prof Michael Berkowitz
m.berkowitz@ucl.ac.uk
I am interested in the history of diagnoses, treatment, and popular perspectives on depression, dementia and Alzheimers, from the early to the late 20th century. Sensitivity to these conditions—and avoidance of addressing individual cases—has led to gaps and distortions in historical narratives and interpretations. My own research focuses on Jews who were engaged in the history of sound and photographic technologies, especially sound motion pictures and colour film, and relationships between music, photography, and memory. I also am developing my research on the history of Kodachrome film into a musical by collaborating with director/writer Leo Doulton and composer Jake Dorfman.

Prof Mark Geller
m.geller@ucl.ac.uk
I work on the history of ancient Babylonian medicine. I am currently on leave (2022-23), courtesy of a Leverhulme grant, working in Paris in association with́ the Paris Institute of Advanced Study, on the relationship between the Syriac Book of Medicine and earlier Akkadian medicine. The research indicates that later Syriac / Aramaic medicine was heavily dependent upon cuneiform medical sources, which were still being read in Late Antiquity. I am also working along parallel lines on Akkadian medicine reflected in the Babylonian Talmud.

Prof Lily Kahn
l.kahn@ucl.ac.uk
Translations of Covid-19 information into Yiddish for the UK Hasidic community, and translation studies research related to this work. The translation of Covid-19 information into Hasidic Yiddish is rooted in the significant role that Arts and Humanities disciplines (in this case, Hasidic Yiddish linguistic and sociolinguistic research) can play in disseminating public health information.

Information Studies

Dr Alison Hicks
a.hicks@ucl.ac.uk
COVID-19: Lockdown, Illness, Vaccines (how people use information to learn about the lockdowns, how people used information to learn about and experience COVID, how people become informed about vaccines, including how they use information to mediate hesitancy . I am carrying out desk based research into health literacy that will become an empirical project in the future. I am leading a module on health librarianship in conjunction with Health Education England. I also focus on wellbeing and health in relation to academic and public libraries (eg bibliotherapy, wellness initiatives) in my teaching. Teaching about library focussed events designed to support health literacy, wellness and health initiatives; research about information sources and becoming informed about COVID, including social, textual and embodied sources.

Dr Rob Miller
r.s.miller@ucl.ac.uk
Our research group has an ambition to apply some of our current research into AI-based automated probabilistic reasoning to health-related risk assessment in the not too distant future.

Dr Daniel Onah
d.onah@ucl.ac.uk
I’m investigating mutation of genes and their association to neurological phenotype of diseases.Applied research in the aspects of: Medical sciences, Computational biology & Bioinformatics

Dr Samantha Rayner
s.rayner@ucl.ac.uk
Vice-Dean (Wellbeing): Connecting up wellbeing work (research and otherwise) within the Faculty and UCL. Bibliotherapy – reading for wellbeing. Specifically at present around the value of book spaces.

Professor Elizabeth Shepherd, Dr Elizabeth Lomas, Dr Anna Sexton
e.shepherd@ucl.ac.uk
Since 2017, a group of researchers in DIS has been engaged on research into the impact of poor recordkeeping on individual lives of children in care and those who leave care, who usually lack a family setting and family memories. The MIRRA research (Memory-Identity-Rights in Records – Access) (https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/mirra/ ) works with care leavers, children’s social workers, information professionals and academic researchers using health & social care data, to improve access to records held by local authorities and charities about children in out-of-home care. For many care leavers, accessing their care records can be part of a therapeutic process of coming to terms with the past.

Philosophy

Dr Sepehr Ehsani
sepehr.ehsani.17@ucl.ac.uk
I work on mechanistic explanations and law-like generalisations in cell biology, and have focused on Alzheimer's disease as a case study in the past several years (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-99838-7_4). Prior to this project and joining the UCL philosophy department, I worked on seasonal patterns of presentation in primary malignant brain tumours and metastases, and the structure and function of the prion protein (PrP) and the alpha-synuclein protein, both linked to neurodegenerative diseases.

Prof James Wilson
james.wilson@ucl.ac.uk
I teach on MA Health Humanities, and MA Philosophy, Politics and Economics of Health. In recent years, this has involved teaching MA level modules on Philosophy, Politics and Economics of Health, and Illness, as well as supervising MA dissertations across the fields of health humanities, bioethics and health policy. I supervise four PhD students on health related topics (chronic disease; the human right to health and resource allocation; the nature of care; and mandatory vaccination). In terms of research, my book Philosophy for Public Health and Public Policy is out in September (OUP). Alongside this, I am a researcher on the UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator, and have ongoing projects on Waiting for care (with Daniel Herron, UCLH, and Lina Minou [Philosophy]), and hope in dementia (with Daniel Herron, and Sebastian Crutch, and Emma Harding [Dementia Research Unit]). I teach in Aesthetics - and this has some crossovers with wellbeing, and arts in health.

SELCS-CMII

James Agar
j.agar@ucl.ac.uk
I teach a final year UG French module on cultural representation of HIV/AIDS which relates to the history, policy and representational practices within the domain of HIV from the 1980s to mid 1990s. I also offer (not every year taken up within workload) a comparative UG module covering similar terrain with primary texts from France, UK, USA, Italy. Several MA offerings touch upon the history of the AIDS crisis in relation to theoretical and cultural work related to sexuality.

Dr Judith Beniston
j.benitson@ucl.ac.uk
I am editing Arthur Schnitzler’s medical drama Professor Bernhardi (1912) for the digital critical edition of Schnitzler's works, have written several articles on this play and have co-organized several medical humanities related events (including translating the play for performance). I have also been asked to contribute an essay on Robert Icke's free adaptation of the play, The Doctor, for the Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine. I am also in the early stages of planning a research project on drama and ageing, and intend to propose an MA module on either drama and ageing or (more broadly) literature and ageing for 2022. My forthcoming research will involve exploring the social perception and representation of age, for example via the topic of age-blind casting and by exploring literary and theatrical representations of dementia, and I will endeavour to involve myself where possible in interdisciplinary initiatives and in public discussions of these issues.

Dr Lucy Bollington
lucy.bollington@ucl.ac.uk
I am currently formulating a new team-taught module on “Disability, Debility and Illness in Theory and Culture” for second-year Comparative Literature students (with a view to running this for the first time in 2022-2023). The titular terms will be approached in broad and inclusive ways, and the case studies will be drawn from different geographical and linguistic contexts, historical time periods and media (the plan is for film, art, literature and performance to each be considered). Health is clearly central to this module, though it is also a topic I address in other modules in different ways. E.g. on my Spanish module, “The Visual Politics of the Drug Wars”, themes of violence, addiction and grief are broached; one of the case studies on the team-taught module “Word, Image, Sound” that I currently teach is Derek Jarman's Blue, which addresses bodily vulnerability and loss in the context of HIV/AIDS; in “Twenty-First Century Fiction” I teach a novella concerned with the intersections of health and environmental crisis, via a narrative about poisoning.

Prof Rachel Bowlby
r.bowlby@ucl.ac.uk
I wrote a book (A Child of One’s Own) about changing parental stories, in real life and the media as much as in literature; it included material about developments in so-called “reproductive technologies” over the past half century (IVF being the stand-out invention). I have also, since then, been researching the history of artificial insemination (now usually called donor insemination). Two years ago I gave an invited plenary lecture for an international conference of neonatal medical specialists. This year I’ve been invited to participate in the advisory group for a project set up by PET (Progress Educational Trust) called “Unused Embryos: Improving Conversations” about Patient Options; the other group members are fertility doctors and embryologists, plus a member of HFEA (the UK regulatory body for reproductive technologies).

Dr Elettra Carbone
elettra.carbone@ucl.ac.uk
Since August 2020 I have started working on the representation of medicine, health and illness in Scandinavian literature focusing particularly (but not exclusively) on nineteenth century representations of medical discoveries and epidemics outside of Scandinavia. This is in the attempt to cast light on past and present discourses of health and illness, particularly in the Nordic region. In relation to student-facing activities, I am currently organising a virtual trip to Oslo to help students in Scandinavian Studies connect and re-connect with their studies, each other and members of staff.

Dr Hans Demeyer
h.demeyer@ucl.ac.uk
My research and teaching on 21st century fiction focuses on an affective crisis: a condition of feeling detached from one’s self, which can take on the form of depression, and of desire being exhausted, which can take on the form of a longing to not exist. More in general, a lot of my research and teaching is concerned with the relation between affect and socio-economic structures - for instance the relation between a debt economy and melancholia/depression.

Prof Stephen M. Hart
stephen.malcolm.hart@ucl.ac.uk
My current research project involves a mapping of the diagnosis and treatment of the symptoms of various outbreaks of ill health among the population of the Viceroyalty of Peru in the first half of the seventeenth century. Though the first hospital of South America, the Hospital of San Andrés, was founded in 1552 (by Viceroy Don Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza), the records kept by the doctors in the first century of its operations are now scarce or lost and – rather curiously – there is more information about the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses such as tertian and quartan fever (nowadays known as malaria), typhus, asthma, sciatica, gout, epilepsy, strokes, ringworm and anorexia mirabilis (‘miraculous anorexia’ as ‘anorexia nervosa’ was known at the time) in the testimonies used by the Catholic Church to beatify (1668) and subsequently canonize (1671) the first saint of the Americas, St Rose of Lima (1586-1671). Though the health information plays second fiddle in the First and Second Apostolic Processes of St Rose, which I have edited (2017, 2019), the wealth of information available in these documents allows us to build up a coherent and evolving panorama of the health of the Peruvian public during this era, to counterbalance the death of information in the medical documents of the period.

Prof Mark Hewitson
m.hewitson@ucl.ac.uk
I am currently working on psychiatry in the First World War as part of a broader project on German conscripts’ exposure to violence. As part of the same project, I published “Combat, Military Medicine and Psychiatric Disorders during and after the Wars of Unification”, in M. P. Davies and S. Shamdasani (eds.), Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-speaking World (London, UCL Press, 2020), 32-59.

Prof Catherine Keen
c.keen@ucl.ac.uk
I am following some research activities that relate broadly to notions of health and the body in the middle ages, and to ideas about grief, mourning and consolation.

Supervising two PGR PhD projects with a health element - 1) Ed Allnut, “The body writ large in Dante's Commedia” (on bodily and cosmological aspects of Dante’s medieval poem, exploring analogies between the ‘bodies’ of the afterworld and medieval notions of body and cosmos), co-supervised with Sophie Page, History; 2) Joseph Strasz, “Paths of Transmission in early Italian Literary Manuscripts” (on Italian poetry, with a substantial section on prison poetry as an expression of grief and consolation).
Set of three interrelated articles in preparation on death, grief, mourning and consolation in Dante’s Vita Nova: one completed, for Jennifer Rushworth & Florian Mussgnug co-edited volume, Dwelling on Grief Narratives of Mourning Across Time and Forms; a second in preparation for publication Italian online journal Quadaerni di Gargnano; a third to be presented at a July conference in Venice.
Joint leader, with KCL colleague Vittorio Montemaggi, in a UCL-KCL reading group on Dante focusing on themes of death and renewal, drawing in PGT/PGR participants where emphases on Jungian interpretation (from Sonu Shamsadanu's PGR student Tommaso Priviero, among others), addiction, embodiment, and attachment theory are among the theoretical approaches shared between participants.

Dr Mart Kuldkepp
m.kuldkepp@ucl.ac.uk
I’m preparing a monograph in the field of political and social history focusing on the intersection between two topics: the history of biological warfare (BW) in the First World War, and the 1918-19 influenza pandemic (the ‘Spanish flu’). The gist of what I'm trying to show is that there existed widespread suspicions in the Allied countries, particularly in the USA, that the germ which had caused the pandemic was in fact some form of German bioweapon – possibly launched in a desperate attempt to gain strategic advantage as Germany was sliding towards its eventual defeat in the second half of 1918.

Prof Claire Lindsay
claire.lindsay@ucl.ac.uk
I am writing a book on travel writing and the emotions for CUP. It takes as its starting point the strong epistemological and phenomenological affinities between feelings and the experience of travel, both of which rest on mobility/movement and in different ways do cultural and political work (note the etymological roots of travel in travail, painful or laborious effort, via Old French from medieval Latin trepalium ‘instrument of torture’). Travel, in its many iterations, including the encounter with and contemplation of the picturesque and the sublime in Romantic travel writing to the provocations of ‘post-colonial’ or ‘dark’ tourism, stimulates a range of complex emotions. And yet, with the exception of some work on the emotions in geography and queer theory, these have gone largely unstudied and/or untheorised in the scholarly work on travel writing. My book will assess the benefits and limitations of the use of critical and theoretical work on the emotions in/on the study of travel and its narratives and ultimately consider what is at stake in the encounter between the fields of the study of travel writing and the emotions. I teach a final year undergraduate ELCS module (also available as an MA bolt-on module) called “Writing Shame” which, notwithstanding the evident discrepancy between the considered, intellectual process of writing and the unpredictable, assaultive quality of this, unwanted, sometimes even unwarranted affect, asks what literature can tell us about shame and considers how it speaks of it. The course, following an exploration of different concepts, definitions and theories of shame, and taking into account important paradigms developed in the European context (for example, in relation to the Holocaust), examines a number of literary and philosophical works which speak to experiences of historical and personal shame in North and South America: from the foundational humiliation of the Conquest to the protracted period of post-revolutionary disillusionment in Mexico; the debacles of the Vietnam and Malvinas-Falklands wars; and the experience of ‘disappearance’ and torture under military dictatorship in the Southern Cone.

Dr Maria-Novella Mercuri
m.mercuri@ucl.ac.uk
1) In January 2020 I gave a talk at the 135th MLA conference in Seattle, Washington. The title was “Paralysis and euthanasia in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree, The Shadow of a Doubt and Ethan Frome”. The Fruit of the Tree, a 1907 novel on which I wrote my Italian thesis, has as a protagonist a nurse, a New Woman figure, who euthanizes a paralysed friend. Apart from its place in the Wharton canon, the novel is now regarded also as a resource for exploring issues such as empathy and sympathy in nursing practice and theory, disabled people”s agency and rights, and power in nursing. The other two works I mention deal with the same themes of disability and assisted suicide, and the protagonist of the play The Shadow of a Doubt, which was discovered and had its premiere on BBC Radio 3 in 2017, is also a nurse. 2) I am now writing the “Wharton and disability” chapter for The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton edited by Emily Orlando, that should come out this year (2021). The title and themes are the same as for my talk. 3) I am also translating The Fruit of the Tree into Italian, and I will include a critical Introduction to the novel that will cover also the latest literature review on the medical discourse. 4) I taught Wharton in undergraduate courses in the past and I am now proposing to include The Fruit of the Tree as one of the set texts for a module for the MA Comparative Literature, on which I also teach.

Dr Jennifer Rushworth
j.rushworth@ucl.ac.uk
Research into mourning/grief in literature in collaboration with Florian Mussgnug and others Forthcoming edited volume: http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Dwelling-on-Grief

Dr Beatrice Sica
b.sica@ucl.ac.uk
My health-related research is divided in two strands: stories of assisted reproduction, donor conception, and LGBTQ families is one; the other is the relationship between literature and trauma. For more details, please click here.

Prof Claire Thomson
claire.thomson@ucl.ac.uk
One strand of my broader research on informational films in Scandinavia and the UK focuses on public health films (1890s-1960s). I’ve published the following articles and chapters on this topic: Thomson, C. (2021). The smoking machine: public health films and public value in Britain and Denmark, 1950-1964. In Hjort, M., Nannicelli, T. (Eds.), Motion Pictures and Public Value. Wiley. [in press] Thomson, C. (2020). “Film and the welfare state: three informational films about healthcare” in Stougaard-Nielsen, J., Lindskog, A. (Eds.), Introduction to Nordic Cultures (pp. 195-209) (London: UCL Press). Thomson, C. (2019). “Kortfilm I kampen mot tuberkulos: ‘Medan det ännu är tid’ som tidstypisk propagandafilm och nationell berättelse.” In Norén, F., Stjernholm, E. (Eds.), Efterkrigstidens samhällskontakter. (pp. 101-124). (Lund, Sweden: Mediehistoriskt arkiv). Thomson, C. (2019). “Screening the population: Public information films in Scandinavian tuberculosis campaigns around 1950.” Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, 9 (1), 59-74. In terms of teaching, I've incorporated UK public health films into the MA Film Studies core course for one lecture/seminar on documentary and informational film, and the role of cinema in the welfare state more generally crops up occasionally in my teaching. I’m currently researching the philanthropic history and filmmaking activities of Carlsberg (the beer company), and working on an article about Thomas Vinterberg's depictions of alcohol in films up to and including the recent Oscar-winning Druk (like much of my previous work, this draws on multisensory and affective approaches to cinema).

Dr Leah Sidi
l.sidi@ucl.ac.uk
Co-director of MA Philosophy, Politics and Economics of Health. Teaching modules on Illness (MA Health Humanities) and Philosophy Politics and Economics of Health (MA PPEH). Developed new module on Feminism and the Medical Self (MA Health Humanities). Research: Writing a monograph on theatre and mental health for Bloomsbury: Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Psychic Life. Recipient of Feminist Review Archive Bursary for archival work on the intellectual history of Care. Upcoming/in progress articles and book chapters on health humanities: - “After the madhouses: the emotional politics of psychiatry and community care in the UK tabloid press 1980-1995" (Medical Humanities 2021) - “Reaching into the blind spot: Rape, trauma and identification in Sarah Kane”s Blasted” (in Wilding Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural life, Routledge 2021) - “Psychiatry on the contemporary UK stage” (in Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine, Routledge 2024) Organising a conference on Representing Women”s Health (2022, TBC).

Prof Sonu Shamdasani
s.shamdasani@ucl.ac.uk
My research is on the history of psychology and psychiatry from the mid 19th to the mid 20th centuries: I have published a dozen monographs and edited volumes in this area. I am currently completing editing an unexpurgated critical edition of the manuscripts of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Princeton University Press), and co-editing (with Cristiana Facchinetti, Fiocruz) a special issue of História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos on transcultural histories of psychotherapies. As general editor of the unpublished works of Jung, I am currently overseeing the editing of eight volumes (Princeton University Press). I convene an international network on the transcultural histories of psychotherapies (currently running virtual seminars), with collaborative events being planned in Rome, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro (when travel resumes). I co-convene the Health Humanities MA, and teach the “Madness” module. I currently have eight PhDs working on health related topics (with two on Wellcome Trust studentships).

Prof Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen
j.stougaard-nielsen@ucl.ac.uk
My research centres on the social work presented in and shaped by popular cultural genres such as Nordic crime fiction and television series. In a monograph and in several articles on Scandinavian crime fiction, I have argued that popular genres participate in negotiations of healthy and socially just societies with high levels of social trust. In particular, I have written about representations of mental health, perceived social deviance and autism, dementia and the personal and social traumas of environmental degradation and colonialism in popular genres. Parallel with this research focus, I have over the past ten years been interested in how ageing societies are considered from the perspective of the Arts and Humanities, and how literary analysis more specifically can contribute to changing experiences and perceptions of ageing. In this area, I co-edited a 2011 special journal issue on Literature, Welfare and Wellbeing, which was followed up, in 2019, by the interdisciplinary conference organised in collaboration with the GC Human Wellbeing and researchers at the University of Southern Denmark on the theme of ‘Treatment, Literature and Old Age’.

Centre for Translation Studies, CMII

Prof Federico Federici
f.m.federici@ucl.ac.uk
My research focuses on language as a social determinant of health when it comes to having access to information in a language and channels that at-risk populations understand. I have been focusing on health-related translation issues in crisis settings since 2014. I recently tried to collaborate with colleagues in Geography and Computer Science (GIS teams) so as to map linguistic minorities against data on the impact of the pandemic in the UK. Marmot’s work has already highlighted the problem of communication among immigrant populations as part of the socio-economic factors affecting health; I’m working to understand ways of supporting multilingual communities not served by traditional, commercial translation and interpreting services when they need to access information or are targeted by public health campaigns. The first step is to find hard evidence of the overlap of language needs with other known socio-economic vulnerabilities

At UCL, I convene CMII0100 Crisis Translation a Level 7 module that focuses on many of these issues. 2) In collaboration with YMCA Sierra Leone and Emergency.it, we are trying to develop translation capacity to support health (as well as risk reduction campaigns) by delivering crisis translation training and training expert linguists of endangered languages as translation trainers. 3) I’m collaborating with Jay Marlowe (University of Auckland) on a project assessing agency in refugee communities and the role of language (and access to information about health) in their pathways to social integration.

I’ve submitted a 12-chapter edited volume under contract with Springer on “Language as a Social Determinant of Health”, which explores case studies of COVID-19 risk communication strategies in a number of countries, across 4 continents. b) On 1 December, Im submitting a 25-chapter co-edited volume under contract with Bloomsbury Academic on “Translation as Risk Reduction” that includes chapters from the International Organization for Migration, Red Cross, Emergency.it [healthcare NGO], GOAL, and Amnesty International focussed on topics related to public health. The volume considers linguistically- and culturally-appropriate information as a human right to access health-related content.

Dr Bettina Bajaj
b.bajaj@ucl.ac.uk
Research into human factors in aviation, in particular human factors such as workload, situation awareness, threat and error management, and communication problems among pilots and air traffic controllers. I’m also interested in extending my research into human factors among translators.

Prof Kathryn Batchelor
k.batchelor@ucl.ac.uk
From 2018-2020 I was working on a research project on “Interlingual Translation and Healthcare Communication in West Africa” with University of Ouagadougou and University of Ghana. We published 3 papers on the topic of multilingualism and health (including one with Wellcome Open Research), and were working up to GCRF application with the AHRC in March 2020 (with a UCL CI from Institute of Global Health) when the pandemic hit. We had to pause our work on the application because of the pandemic and have not yet resumed it because the funding pots to which we were going to apply have been dissolved or significantly reduced. However, I am liaising with Federico Federici, who is active in a project in Sierra Leone, to see if we can build towards a large joint project in the future. At CenTraS we are going to run an online series of guest lectures on the theme of “translation and health” in 2021-22. In 2020-21, our theme was “translation and technology”. These two themes - which also combine together in important ways - represent key interests of a number of staff and postgraduates in CenTraS.

Dr Veronica Frintal-Miller
v.miller@ucl.ac.uk
Teaching language specific interpreting seminars on ageing for MSc students.

David Stockings
david.stockings@ucl.ac.uk
Teaching German to English strand of CMII0096: Medical Translation.

Dr Olivia Cockburn
o.cockburn@ucl.ac.uk
We have recently initiated a translation collaboration between CenTraS and the UCL-led service called Rare Dementia Support (www.raredementiasupport.org). The Rare Dementia Support’s website provides important information on Dementia and related illnesses and translating its content into numerous languages will allow them to disseminate this worldwide. From the academic year 2021/22, CenTraS students will have the opportunity to practise and implement the skills they have learned in their translation classes in a “real-life” scenario, by volunteering to produce translations that will be published on the Rare Dementia Support service’s website. Members of CenTraS will be guiding the students with their translations. Specialised texts will be translated by students of the MSc courses on Medical and Scientific and Technical translation, whilst semi-specialised texts will be offered to MA students too.

Dr Victoria Solomonidis-Hunter
v.solomonidis-hunter@ucl.ac.uk
The Ancient Greek medical corpus, including the works of Hippocrates, Galen and Dioscourides, was ‘lost’ to the medieval West until c.1000 AD. In the preceding centuries, it had been translated mainly in Damascus and Baghdad from Greek into Arabic [8th-10thc] and then, via the cultural borderlands of the Latin Kingdoms of the Near East, north Africa, Normal Sicily and Spain, found its way to Europe, where it was translated from Arabic into Latin [11th-12th c.]. By then, the Greek corpus had been enhanced with Arabic commentaries, discoveries and additions and these Latin translations resulted in the creation of “new” medical texts which made an important contribution to the 12th century scientific renaissance in Europe. My “Translation in the 12th century” two-part seminar relates this story and highlights the influence and contribution of these medical translations to the establishment of the first medical schools and universities in the West, which, in turn, set the foundations of medical research as we know it today.

Dr Claire Shih
y.shih@ucl.ac.uk
I teach and convene CMII0096 Medical Translation Research: Although not immediately obvious in their titles, the latest two publications of mine effectively investigated how trainee and professional translators use the internet to search for (multilingual) medical information and terminologies for medical translation. I am currently working on a monograph in the same theme. “Navigating the web: a study on professional translators’ behaviour”, Empirical Studies in Translation and Interpreting: The Post-Structualist Approach, Routledge, 2021, pp. 74-92. “A quest for web search optimisation: an evidence-based approach to trainee translators’ behaviour”, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 27:6, 2019, pp. 908-923. I was awarded the UCL Beacon Bursary grant in 2017/2018, titled, “Promoting access to health services and health information in the Chinese community in the UK: a translation and interpreting project and an app for medical terminologies”. Working directly with the community group/Charitable organisation in London, “Chinese National Healthy Living Centre (CNHLC)”, an (Android) app for Dementia in Chinese was developed as a result. I was also involved in translating and revising the Dementia Guide in Traditional Chinese (2nd edition), published by the Alzheimer Society.

Sarah Parker Remond Centre/IAS

Dr Paige Patchin
p.patchin@ucl.ac.uk
Cultural/historical book on the Zika virus -leading a course on race, empire, and health as part of the new Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies MA programme.

Slade School of Fine Art

Dr Hayley Newman
h.newman@ucl.ac.uk
Creativity for mental health, Covid-19: https://firstsite.uk/event/art-for-life/. Memory, repetition and climate change in the forthcoming book Ray. The role of art in social change and the importance of creativity for wellbeing.

Dr Deborah Padfield
d.padfield@ucl.ac.uk
A visual artist specialising in lens-based media and intersectional practice and research within Fine Art and Medicine. She has collaborated extensively with clinicians and patients exploring the value of visual images to clinician-patient interactions and the communication of pain.

Estelle Thompson
estelle.thompson@ucl.ac.uk
Commissioned to produce public Arts project for the Women’s Centre and Maternity Wing entrance - John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. Colour IoN/DRI research project - UCL.

Jo Volley
j.volley@ucl.ac.uk
Commissioned to produce a public arts project the Alexandra Works in 2008 by the Alexander Primary Health Care Trust funded by NHS LIFT Hull Arts and Health Programme.
2016 Colour & Emotion: Measuring Wellbeing Creatively: Co-production of a Non-Verbal Wellbeing Measure UCL Grand Challenges Small Grants: Human Wellbeing
2022 Ongoing -Colour IoN/DRI research project, UCL