Staff Profile
Professor Anne Whitehead
Prof of Modern & Contemporary Literature
- Email: anne.whitehead@ncl.ac.uk
- Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 3531
- Personal Website: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/annewhitehead/
Background
Anne has worked at Newcastle University since she was appointed as a lecturer in 1999.
Anne has research and teaching interests in contemporary fiction, life writing, and poetry; the intersections between creative and critical writing; medical humanities; memory studies, and the contemporary representation of grief and mourning.
Internal Roles
Anne is Director of Research for the School of English. She is also co-ordinating the REF2029 submission for English Literature and Creative Writing.
At Faculty level, Anne is a co-lead of the Newcastle University Medical Humanities Network.
External Roles
Anne is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College (2017-26) and she has reviewed funding applications for the Leverhulme Trust, the Wellcome Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Icelandic Research Fund, the FWO Vlanderen, and the National University of Ireland.
Anne is a founding and steering group member of the Wellcome funded Northern Network for Medical Humanities. She sits on the international advisory board of the Centre for Women's Mental Health at Uppsala University in Sweden, as well as on the editorial advisory board of the Edinburgh University Press book series Contemporary Cultural Studies of Illness, Health and Medicine.
Anne is currently an external examiner on the BSc. Medical Humanities program at Glasgow University (2023-27).
Google Scholar Profile: Click here.
Current Research
Anne's monograph, Relating Suicide, has been published with Bloomsbury Press (Academic), as one of the first publications in the Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities series. Departing from the prevailing narrativization of suicide in terms of why it happened, Anne turns instead to the questions of when, how, and where, calling attention to suicide's materiality as well as its materialization. Combining critical and textual analysis with personal reflection, Anne examines the days, months, and years following a death by suicide. This pivoting of attention to what happens in the wake of suicide brings to light the often-surprising ways in which suicide is woven into the everyday places that we inhabit, and in which it is related to all of us, albeit with varying degrees of proximity and kinship. You can learn more about the book here.
Research Profile
Anne's research has been animated by the question of how we both relate, and relate to, stories that are difficult to tell. She started in the field of trauma studies, asking in Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) how contemporary novelists represent traumatic experience. She co-edited with J. J. Long the first collection of essays on W. G. Sebald to be published in English, examining the complexities of this writer's relationship to German and broader colonial histories. In her monograph Memory: New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2008), Anne traced the longer history of our relation of, and to, the past, and this work was accompanied by the co-edited volume Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
More recently Anne has worked in the field of the medical humanities, with a particular interest in narratives of illness and loss. She co-edited with Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and she focused on empathy's relation to medicine in her monograph Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
Anne has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, Textual Practice and Literature and Medicine, and she co-edited a special issue of Feminist Theory on feminism and affect with Carolyn Pedwell (2012).
Engaged Research
Anne's research expertise has informed a range of projects that collaborate with different publics.
With the support of the Catherine Cookson Foundation, Anne worked with David de la Haye in 2023-24 to create a sound work that documents the grassroots memorial site in a stand of trees near the Angel of the North. The sound piece brings into conversation interviews that capture the stories of people who have left memorial tributes at the Angel, sound recordings of the site across the seasons, and the 'voice' of the Angel itself. The project featured in The Guardian, and Radio 4's Today and Sunday programs. You can find out more about the project here, and you can listen to the sound piece here.
Anne also worked with parents who had lost a baby from a multiple pregnancy, making a short, animated film about this complex form of grief. This project was a collaboration with Judith Rankin (Professor of Maternal and Child Health, Newcastle University), artist Kate Sweeney, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, and the Tiny Lives Trust. The project was the recipient of the Newcastle University Engagement and Place Award for Health, Wellbeing and Societal Benefit in 2023. You can learn more about the collaboration and watch the film here.
Anne was also Project Lead on an Innovate UK/AHRC funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children's Books, working with Lucy Pearson and Jessica Medhurst. This project drew on Anne's research expertise in trauma narratives to build capacity for adult-facing exhibitions at Seven Stories. The project was the recipient of the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Award for Knowledge Exchange Project of the Year, 2017, and was commended by the judges as 'an exemplar of how a School of English can engage in knowledge exchange'. It formed part of an Impact Case Study in REF2021.
Undergraduate Teaching
Anne lectures on the stage 1 module Transformations and contributes lectures and seminars to Contemporary Cultures, a large team-taught module at stage 2. Her sole taught module at stage 3, Contemporary Experimental Writing and Medicine, looks at how medical themes have been explored across a range of literary genres paying close attention to questions of form. Anne also supervises stage 3 dissertations on contemporary topics.
Postgraduate Teaching
Anne contributes a session to the MA Research Methods training module and she supervises MA dissertations. She also co-runs with Vicky Long an introductory session on the medical humanities for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Doctoral Training Program, Thinking Theories and Methods.
Doctoral Supervision
Anne is an experienced supervisor of doctoral projects and welcomes applications in all areas of her expertise. She is currently supervising the following PhD projects:
Tamzin Mackie, 'Julia Darling's New Vocabularies of Pain: Mapping Body, Gender and Place' (Northern Bridge funded English Literature PhD; co-supervisors Dr Alex Niven and Professor Jane Macnaughton).
Liz Sands, 'Spectres of Thatcherism: Melancholia and Spaces of Isolation in Contemporary Women's Writing' (Wellcome Trust funded English Literature PhD; co-supervisors Dr Ella Dzelzainis and Professor Clare Bambra).
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Articles
- Whitehead A. "Your tiny white vests, unworn": Contemporary elegies of maternal loss. Literature and Medicine 2023, 41(2), 372-390.
- Whitehead A. Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes: Between Archive and Repertoire. Modern Fiction Studies 2021, 67(1), 20-39.
- Whitehead A. Reading with empathy: Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother. Feminist Theory 2012, 13(2), 181-195.
- Pedwell C, Whitehead A. Introduction: Affecting feminism: Questions of feeling in feminist theory. Feminist Theory 2012, 13(2), 115-129.
- Whitehead A. Writing with care: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Contemporary Literature 2011, 52(1), 54-83.
- Whitehead A. Journeying through hell: Wole Soyinka, trauma, and postcolonial Nigeria. Studies in the Novel 2008, 40(1-2), 13-30.
- Whitehead A. Tony Harrison, the Gulf War and the poetry of protest. Textual Practice 2005, 19(2), 349-+.
- Whitehead A. The past as revenant: Trauma and haunting in Pat Barker's Another World. Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction 2004, 45(2), 129-146.
- Whitehead A. 'Telling Tales: Trauma and Testimony in Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments'. Discourse 2003, 25(1 & 2), 119-137.
- Whitehead A. Geoffrey Hartman and the Ethics of Place: Landscape, Memory, Trauma. European Journal of English Studies 2003, 7(3), 275-292.
- Whitehead A. A Still, Small Voice: Letter-writing, Testimony and the Project of Address in Etty Hillesum's Letters from Westerbork. Cultural Values 2001, 5(1), 79-96.
- Whitehead A. Refiguring Orpheus: The possession of the past in Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Textual Practice 1999, 13, 227-241.
- Anne Whitehead. Open to Suggestion: Hypnosis and History in Pat Barker's Regeneration. Modern Fiction Studies, 44 674-694 1998.
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Authored Books
- Whitehead A. Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Perspective. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
- Whitehead A. Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction: An Intervention in Medical Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
- Whitehead A. Memory. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
- Whitehead A. Trauma fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
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Book Chapters
- Whitehead A, Woods A. Introduction. In: Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards, ed. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, pp.1-31.
- Whitehead A. War and Beauty: The Act of Unmasking in Pat Barker's Toby's Room and Louisa Young's My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You. In: Saunders C; Macnaughton J; Fuller D, ed. The Recovery of Beauty: Arts, Culture, Medicine. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp.217-234.
- Whitehead A. The Medical Humanities: A Literary Perspective. In: Victoria Bates, Alan Bleakley, and Samuel Goodman, ed. Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities. London and New York: Routledge, 2014, pp.107-127.
- Whitehead A. Representing the Child Soldier: Trauma, Postcolonialism and Ethics in Delia Jarrett-Macauley's Moses, Citizen and Me. In: Ganteau, JM; Onega, S, ed. Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi BV, 2011, pp.205-234.
- Whitehead A. Trauma and Resistance in Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers. In: Crownshaw, R; Kilby, J; Rowland, A, ed. The Future of Memory. Oxford: Berghahn, 2010, pp.241-251.
- Whitehead A. The Role of Theories of Memory in Teaching the Holocaust. In: Eaglestone R; Langford B, ed. Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp.37-47.
- Whitehead A. Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy. In: Shaffer, B.W, ed. A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, pp.550-561.
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Edited Books
- Whitehead A, Woods A, Atkinson S, Macnaughton J, Richards J, ed. Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
- Pedwell C, Whitehead A, ed. Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Feminist Theory (Special issue of Feminist Theory). London: Sage, 2012.
- Rossington M, Whitehead A, Contributing eds.: Anderson L, Chedgzoy K, Mukherjee P, Richards J, ed. Theories of Memory: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
- Long JJ, Whitehead A, ed. W. G. Sebald - A Critical Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
- Rossington M, Whitehead A, ed. Between the Psyche and the Polis: Refiguring History in Literature and Theory. Aldershot and Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2000.