Professor Andrew Mangham

Areas of interest

My primary research area is the intersection between literature and medicine. I began my research career by looking at the links between Victorian conceptions of female psychopathology, the insanity plea in criminal courts, and sensation fiction. Since then, I've published monographs on Charles Dickens and forensic medicine, the physiology of starvation and the Victorian social problem novel, and monstrosity in the literature, medicine, and natural history of the long nineteenth century. My work has concentrated on the intellectual and methodological elements that literature and medicine have in common. I'm also interested in applied medical humanities, gothicism, realism, ideas of sexuality and health, real crime, and popular fiction. I always welcome new enquiries about PhD supervision.

I am founder and director of the Centre for Health Humanities, an interdisciplinary group of researchers from across the University. We are interested in the ways the arts and humanities intersect with the questions asked by the sciences of health and wellbeing. As a group, we undertake regular research and public-engagement activities around three major themes: life transition; minds, bodies and sickness; and monsters and the monstrous. Through these interlinking and interdisciplinary areas, we explore some of the most important subjects in health enquiry today, from the phenomenology of sickness, the effects and perceptions of ageing, to cultural understandings of physiological difference. For more information, follow us on Twitter @healthhums

Within the Department of English Literature, I teach modules on literature and healing, Dickens, and Victorian literature.