Congratulations to Dr Joey Isaac Jenkins on their funding award.

Newcastle Medical Humanities Network is delighted to congratulate Dr Joey Isaac Jenkins on being awarded a Catherine Cookson Foundation grant for their project 'Bleeding Disorders: Representation and Experience'.

Bleeding disorders like haemophilia and von Willebrand Disease have often been thematised in literature and popular culture in a way that presents them as spectacular and externalised phenomena. The fiction of haemophiliac writers such as Jim Grimsley (Winter Birds, 1992; Comfort & Joy, 1993) and Tom Andrews (The Haemophiliac’s Motorcycle, 1994), however, highlights the extent to which such representations risk both sensationalising bleeding disorders and misrepresenting the more complex ways in which they are experienced. This cross-disciplinary project involves: 1) a mapping of scholarship on bleeding disorders in the humanities; 2) a national survey aimed at individuals living with chronic bleeding disorders gauging views representation and visibility in literature and popular culture; 3) a creative workshop (blended delivery) for individuals living with bleeding disorders, facilitated by a creative practitioner, in which attendees will produce poetic and prose reflections on lived experience and/or literary cultural representations of bleeding disorders; 4) an article on the representation of bleeding disorders in literature.

The project will provide new insights into how accurately representations of haemophilia and von Willebrand Disease in literature and popular culture reflect the experiences of those living with blood disorders.

Dr Joey Isaac Jenkins is an Associate Lecturer in the School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics.

Last modified: Fri, 09 Sep 2022 16:30:46 BST