Dr James Whitehead
Humanities and Social Science
Faculty of Arts Professional and Social Studies
Email: J.R.Whitehead@ljmu.ac.uk
Telephone: 0151 231 5128
I am currently Programme Leader for English and am happy to field any questions about our degree programme from current or prospective students.
My research and teaching interests include Romanticism and its legacies, psychiatry and other psy-sciences in relation to nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, and life-writing (autobiography and biography) about mental health and illness. My core undergraduate teaching includes 5111ENGL Romanticism and 5108ENGL Poetry Matters. I am also very happy to discuss postgraduate study and research plans in these areas.
I am currently working on two monographs, one on the representation (and appropriation) of schizophrenia in twentieth-century literature and culture, to appear in Liverpool University Press’s Representations series, and the other on the history of autobiographical narratives about mental illness and confinement.
I am also responsible for the administration of The Hazlitt Society, dedicated to the Romantic-period writer and essayist, and the annual journal it produces, The Hazlitt Review. Queries or submissions for the society or journal should be sent to: hazlittsociety@gmail.com. For more information see: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hazlitt-society.
Degrees
2011, King's College London, UK, PhD in English
2006, University College London, UK, MA in English
2002, University of Oxford, UK, BA in English Language and Literature
Academic appointments
Programme Leader for English, Liverpool John Moores University, 2021 - present
Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in English, Liverpool John Moores University, 2014 - present
Lecturer in English and Medical Humanities, King's College London, 2011 - 2012
Wellcome Research Fellow, King's College London, 2010 - 2014
Assistant Editor, Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2003 - 2005
Chapters
Whitehead JR. 2020. 'A song in the night': reconsidering John Clare's later asylum poetry Kövesi S, Lafford E. Advances in John Clare Studies :275-296 Palgrave Macmillan DOI Publisher Url Public Url
Books (authored)
Whitehead JR. 2017. Madness and the Romantic Poet: A Critical History Oxford University Press. Oxford 9780198733706 DOI Publisher Url
Journal article
Whitehead JR. 2015. Biopower: bodies, minds and biographical subjection in Victorian Lives of the Poets Victorian Network, 6 :7-31 Publisher Url Public Url
Conference presentation:
panel presentation, Universidade Católica, Lisbon, Portugal, ‘Remembering Voices Lost’, MLA Europe Symposium, ‘What sort of genre is illness narrative?’. 2019
conference paper, University of Edinburgh, ‘Madness, Mental Illness and Mind Doctors in 20th and 21st Century Popular Culture’, ‘The schizophrenic century: schizophrenia from modernism to mass culture’. 2018
conference paper, University of California Berkeley, ‘Romantic Disorder’, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference, 'Disorder and disease in Romantic reviewing’. 2016
invited talk, King's College London, AHRC New Generations Workshop, 'Illness narrative and historical testimony'. 2015
colloquium contribution, Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, Athens, Greece, 'Athens Dialogues: Medical Humanities', ‘Autobiography, authenticity, and the medical humanities’. 2014
conference paper, Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie, Vienna, ‘Beyond the Subject: New Developments in Life Writing’, International Auto/Biography Association Conference, ‘Memoirs of mental illness—autobiographical and medical subjects’. 2013
conference paper, Trinity College, Oxford, Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle, ‘The data of degeneration: biography, psychiatry, and the figure of the Romantic poet’. 2013
conference paper, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 'Romantic Prospects', NASSR Conference, ‘On the giddy brink: the Romantic precipice poem’. 2012
conference paper, University of Northumbria, Newcastle, 'Situating and Interpreting States of Mind', ‘Voices of experience: autobiographical accounts of psychosis and their genres’. 2012
invited colloquium contribution, Heyman Center for Humanities, Columbia University, New York, ‘Evaluation, Value and Evidence: Medicine, Humanities, and the Human Sciences’ Colloquium, ‘Using the evidence of autobiography’. 2012
invited lecture, University of Bristol, 'Medicine, Health and the Arts', ‘Common concerns? literature and medicine since 1945’. 2012
Other invited event:
Durham University, symposium respondent, ‘25 Years of Madness and Modernism’. 2018
Institute of Psychiatry, Denmark Hill, London, invited lecture, ‘Madness and creativity: debunking the myth?’. 2014
Green Templeton College, Oxford, invited lecture, 'Pathology and poetry: psychiatry and literature'. 2011
External committees:
Arts and Humanities Research Council, Peer Review College. 2018
Other Professional Activity:
External Examiner, BA English, Edge Hill University. 2018
External PGR Supervision - completed students:
PhD, King's College London, Dementia in science, medicine and literature of the twentieth century. 2017
PhD, King's College London, The British anti-psychiatrists from institutional psychiatry to the counter-culture 1960-1971. 2015
PhD, King's College London, The Coleridge Legacy: the development of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's intellectual legacy in Britain and America, 1834-1934. 2014
Conference organisation:
‘A Narrative Future for Health Care’, King's College London. 2013
Hazlitt Society Annual Lecture and Day Conference (since 2012).
Editorial boards:
Assistant Editor, The Hazlitt Review, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/hazlitt-society/hazlitt-review. 2012