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A&H Staff Conducting Health Related Research

The Faculty has around fifty academics engaged in directly health-related research.Given that art and the humanities are essential for health & well-being, much of the wider research also contributes.

Arts and Sciences

  • Helen Chatterjee: Helen's research explores the interconnections between the health of the environment and the health of people, and includes biodiversity conservation, cultural and natural value, and evidencing the impact of natural and cultural participation on health.
  • Ranjita Dhital: Her public health research is informed by creative and participatory methodologies. Her research is applying arts and community-based approaches to reduce alcohol harm and promote mental wellbeing in high- and low-income countries.
  • Helen Jury: Helen's research is on the touch and handling of materials and objects in Art Psychotherapy as a distinctive therapeutic medium. 
  • Thomas Kador: With a background spanning chemical engineering and cultural heritage (archaeology and museums), Thomas is particularly interested in the relationship between culture, nature and health. 
  • Wendy Sims-Schouten: Wendy has a specific interest in interdisciplinary research (historic and contemporary) with a focus on wellbeing, eclectic resilience (including resistance and defiance) and coproduction and has researched (and published) in the areas of mental health, safeguarding and inclusive practice with members from disadvantaged, displaced and marginalised communities
  • Linda Thomson: Linda is interested in the role of creativity and co-productive processes in enhancing health and wellbeing, and addressing health inequalities. Linda developed the UCL Creative Wellbeing Measures for assessing psychological wellbeing derived from participation in arts, museums, cultural and nature-based activities.

English

  • Lara Choksey: Lara has worked on how technologies of DNA sequencing have transformed the narration of human time, in readings of a range of texts.
  • Helen Hackett: Has published a monograph (Yale UP) called The Elizabethan Mind, a study of how the Elizabethans thought about the mind in relation to the body, the soul, and the self, and how their turbulent debates on this subject shaped their radical literary innovations.
  • Beth Malory: Beth specialises in medical communication, with a particular focus on the diagnostic language of reproductive medicine.

Hebrew and Jewish Studies

  • Michael Berkowitz: He is interested in the history of diagnoses, treatment, and popular perspectives on depression, dementia and Alzheimers, from the early to the late 20th century.
  • Mark Geller: He works on the history of ancient Babylonian medicine, Akkadian medicine in the Babylonian Talmud, Akkadian medicine in the Syriac Book of Medicine, and Jewish magic and medicine.
  • Lily Kahn: Has worked on translations of Covid-19 information into Yiddish for the UK Hasidic community, and translation studies research related to this work.

Information Studies

  • Alison Hicks: Alison's major strand of research focuses on how risk and transition is informed within academic, health, everyday and work contexts. A secondary strand examines information literacy discourse. 
  • Elizabeth Lomas: Her research interests are information management and rights through time. Her research includes the MIRRA project which has sought to drive forward information rights for care experienced people.
  • Daniel Onah: Daniel has investigated mutation of genes and their association to neurological phenotype of diseases. He has completed applied research in the aspects of Medical sciences, Computational biology & Bioinformatics.
  • Samantha Rayner: Sam is Vice-Dean (Wellbeing). She has been connecting up wellbeing work (research and otherwise) within the Faculty and UCL. She is interested in bibliotherapy – reading for wellbeing - and the value of book spaces.
  • Anna Sexton: Her research interests are primarily focused on participatory, creative and trauma-informed approaches to archives and recordkeeping particularly in the context of health, mental health and social care. 

Philosophy

  • Guilia Cavaliere: She works on infertility, the desire to have children and novel assisted reproductive technologies.
  • Sepehr Ehsani: He works on mechanistic explanations and law-like generalisations in cell biology. He has researched the augmentation of mechanistic explanations of disease with hypothesized cell biological principles.
  • James Wilson: He has published widely on public health ethics, the philosophy of public policy, and on the ownership and governance of ideas and information. 

School of East European and Slavonic Studies

  • Chiara Amini: Her primary area of interest lies in evaluating the social impact of the arts and creative industries, including wellbeing.
  • Elodie Douarin: she has worked on the legacies of conflict victimisation and is interested in post-traumatic growth or change in values and beliefs after a shock. She has done some work on subjective wellbeing.
  • Egbert Klautke: Has published on topics such as race psychology and eugenics. He has also written on the emergence, rise and repudiation of ‘folk psychology’ in Germany from 1851-1955, reconstructing the history of this branch of psychological thought and arguing that its repercussions can be observed until the present day.
  • Diane P Koenker: Has written about the study of vocations and tourism in the Soviet Union, revealing the tension between leisure travel as a state tool for creating loyal subjects and individuals’ appropriation of that tool to cultivate their own autonomous well-being. 
  • Alberto Prati: His field of interest is economic psychology. He studies topics in wellbeing measurement (How can we evaluate if a society, or an individual life, has improved? How can these evaluations help guide public policies?).
  • Kristen Roth-Ey: Has written about the solidarity and the aesthetics of pain in Soviet documentary film about the Vietnam War and how it calls upon viewers to draw connections between the suffering of the Vietnamese and the Soviet wartime experience. 

SELCS-CMII

  • James Agar: He is interested in cultural discourses of AIDS, especially in the work of Hervé Guibert; gender studies, especially gay studies and queer theory; medical humanities, especially literature and medicine.
  • Judith Beniston: Has edited Arthur Schnitzler’s medical drama Professor Bernhardi (1912) and written several articles on it. She has researched the social perception and representation of age, for example by exploring literary and theatrical representations of dementia.
  • Elettra Carbone: Has worked 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.
  • Hans Demeyer: His research 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.
  • Stephen M. Hart: His research has involved 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. 
  • Mark Hewitson: Has worked on the psychiatry in the First World War as part of a broader project on German conscripts’ exposure to violence. He has published on military medicine and psychiatric disorders.
  • Catherine Keen: Has conducted research activities that relate broadly to notions of health and the body in the middle ages, and to ideas about grief, mourning and consolation. 
  • Mart Kuldkepp: He has published on the history of biological warfare (BW) in the First World War, and the 1918-19 influenza pandemic (the ‘Spanish flu’).
  • Maria-Novella Mercuri: Has spoken on paralysis and euthanasia in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree. The novel is regarded as a resource for exploring issues such as empathy and sympathy in nursing practice and theory, disabled peoples agency and rights, and power in nursing.
  • Jennifer Rushworth: Has conducted research on mourning/grief in literature
  • Beatrice Sica: Has published on literature and health, health prevention, and the representation of diseases in children’s picture books. Also completed research on assisted reproduction and donor conception in children’s books.
  • Claire Thomson: One strand of my broader research on informational films in Scandinavia and the UK focuses on public health films (1890s-1960s).
  • Leah Sidi: Her research specialises in theatrical representations of mental illness and madness in modern and contemporary theatre, and feminist writing on illness, mental health and care.
  • Sonu Shamdasani: Vice-Dean (Health). His research is on the history of psychology and psychiatry from the mid 19th to the mid 20th centuries. He convenes an international network studying transcultural histories of psychotherapies and is general editor of the Critical Edition of the Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton University Press).
  • Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen: He has 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. He is also 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.
  • Federico Federici: He studies communication of health risks in multilingual contexts and language as a social determinant of health that is a key factor to pursue health equity. He is a member of the Matrix project - The Many Faces of Trauma and Recovery around the World. 
  • Kathryn Batchelor: Has conducted research on "Interlingual Translation and Healthcare Communication in West Africa” and is interested in multilingualism and health, and translation and health.
  • David Stockings: Has experience in Medical Translation, specifically German to English.
  • Olivia Cockburn: Has worked with Rare Dementia Support on tralsation of medical information on their website.
  • Victoria Solomonidis-Hunter: Has taught on Latin translations of the Ancient Greek medical corpus, and their influence and contribution to the establishment of the first medical schools and universities in the West.
  • Claire Shih: Has taught on medical translation and has researched how trainee and professional translators use the internet to search for (multilingual) medical information and terminologies for medical translation.

  • Caiwen Wang: Has worked with Rare Dementia Support on the translation of medical information on their website and has collaborated in a project with the Chinese National Healthy Living Centre, a charitable organisation based in London.

IAS / Sarah Parker Remond Centre

  • Paige Patchin: Has published on the Zika virus and leads s course on race, empire, and health.

Slade School of Fine Art

  • Hayley Newman: Has worked on creativity for mental health and wellbeing.
  • Deborah Padfield: Specialises 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: Commissioned to produce public Arts project for the Women’s Centre and Maternity Wing entrance - John Radcliffe Hospital.
  • Jo Volley: 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. Also commissioned to develop a wall work for the UCL DRI-IoN building exploring colour and dementia as part of its public art programme.