Madness and Literature Network

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Literary research has become a key resource for the advancement of medical and allied health professionals' education, affording broader perspectives, critical thinking skills and promoting an emotionally receptive or empathic climate for clinical practice. Such initiatives have included a specific focus on mental health and literature. However, there is yet to be developed a cohesive and sustainable movement away from the Medical Humanities towards a more inclusive and less medically-dominated Health Humanities. With this project, we are seeking to form new methodologies, strengthen and maintain partnerships and enable inclusive critical dialogues across this field. UK and US literature offers many valuable and sometimes contrasting insights into experiences of mental illness, attitudes towards individuals deemed mentally ill, their treatment and the social networks and institutions within which such experiences unfold. The term 'madness' has been employed deliberately here to signal this project's alignment with literary and historical scholarship rather than a necessarily narrower clinical focus, as would be implied by terms such as 'mental disorder'. To date there is little comprehensive and sustained collaborative working between US and UK scholars on representations of madness in literature. The proposed Madness and Literature Network (MLN) will stimulate cooperation between US and UK researchers and creative writers, to advance and sustain these approaches within health organizations and educational settings. It will also promote a health humanities approach, encourage co-operation and exchange of ideas between disciplines and sectors, and uncover new methodological challenges beyond the academy, seeking confluence and an applicable legacy. Both the US and the UK are beginning to engage with a health humanities discourse. A Public Lecture Series hosted by the University of Durham that attracted eminent speakers such as Roy Porter and Pat Barker was subsequently published as a collection of essays by Palgrave, demonstrating the growing interest in this diverse area. At Nottingham University's School of Nursing, the biggest in the UK, mental health students are exposed to student directed learning in fiction about mental illness. In the USA, the development of university-led websites such as Medical Humanities at New York University's School of Medicine have contributed to medical humanities syllabi and foregrounded the work of eminent scholars in this field. Several journals are published with a detailed focus on the health humanities - these will be crucial in forming a published record of research conducted through the MLN. What is lacking is a cohesive and shared communication between the US and the UK. The MLN will change this. Crawford is well placed to lead this network in keeping with AHRC international strategy and by being firmly rooted in the arts and humanities disciplines. His work is deeply embedded in literary and linguistic disciplines which is an imperative for an emergent field of research which aims to reinforce the place of the humanities in what has been traditionally the domain of medical science. He has worked in mental healthcare since 1986 and has conducted both literary and linguistic research relevant to healthcare over the last 12 years, holding grants from The British Academy, ESRC and The Leverhulme Trust. He is co-founder and chair of the interdisciplinary Health Language Research Group (HLRG) at Nottingham University, one of whose key academic partners is the School of English, which is world-renowned for its research in both language and literature and where the lead PI is co-situated. The project builds on the acclaimed critical scholarship of its academic contributors,a current project with The Leverhulme Trust on the representation of madness in post-war UK and US Fiction, and also offers development opportunities for Charley Baker, a Research Associate who is completing a PhD.