Place, space, health

Place, space, health: representing the North-South divide in literature and culture

Queries should be directed in the first instance to Dr Ella Dzelzainis (ella.dzelzainis@newcastle.ac.uk)

Interested in pursuing a PhD project examining the relation between place, space and health in literary/cultural representations of the North-South divide? This PhD studentship allows you to carve out your own area of investigation within a wider multidisciplinary Wellcome Trust funded project on regional health inequalities in England, focusing on the north-south divide. The successful candidate will be expected to contribute to wider project team discussions and publications.  

Applicants should include a proposal outlining how they would approach this project. We encourage you to think imaginatively about possible texts and topics. You may wish to focus on literary/cultural responses from (or about) a specific period when health inequalities came to the fore (eg, the Victorian Condition-of-England novel, interwar theatre of the Great Depression, the kitchen sink realism of the 1950s and 60s, realizations of the 1980s Miners’ Strike and industrial decline, or the more immediate cultural responses to the coronavirus pandemic in poetry, prose, film). Or you may wish your project to be driven by topic, such as the working-class experience, teenage mental and physical health, the literature of the North, a specific health condition (drug addiction? tuberculosis? depression?), literature and political activism, the representation of the ageing / infant / maternal / labouring body. A wide range of text sources could potentially be exploited for this research: fiction, poetry, drama, periodicals, graphic novels and zines, the TV serial, film.

Newcastle hosts a thriving multidisciplinary medical humanities network encompassing postgraduate researchers, and resources that may be useful for this research, including the nineteenth-century novel, contemporary literature and poetry collections in the Robinson Library.

Last modified: Fri, 01 Jul 2022 11:49:13 BST