We often collaborate with, and support projects organised by, the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury that form part of their health and wellbeing programme.

We also work closely with the Kent Medical Humanities network led by Leads in Medical Humanities within Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, Medway, Dartford and Gravesham, and Kent & Medway NHS trusts. Click here to read more about the network’s aims. Collaborative events have included a day of Medical Humanities workshops at the University of Kent. Annual conferences of this network will be advertised below.

Previous events

Kent Medical Humanities Network: 6th Regional Medical Humanities Seminar. 19th March 2020. Programme available here.

Projects have included the exhibition Prescriptions (21 April-25 September 2016) curated by Dr Stella Bolaki and Egidija Čiricaitė. Other relevant events and projects include: a project around the effects of social isolation & health; a dementia & writing group running in the Learning Lab using their displays & handling collections; The Power of the Object; and a Front Room exhibition that was the culmination of six sessions run by an art therapist in the Beaney. We also supported Henry Cockburn’s exhibition in the Beaney.

In May 2017 we supported an event co-organised by the Pilgrim’s Hospice and the School of English, a reading by Michel Faber, as part of Dying Matters Awareness Week and in October 2017 a panel discussion “The Art of Dying Well” as part of the Canterbury Arts Festival.

Past conferences/symposia organised and co-hosted by the School of English have included:

• Tell me What Hurts: Storytelling and the Healing Arts (hosted by Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England and co-sponsored by the University of Kent), 13 September 2018.
• Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities
• Cross-disciplinary Phenomenology: A Readiness for the Questionable
• Bridging the Divide: Literature and Science
• Fear and Loathing: Phobia in Literature and Culture
• Home|less

Research seminars/events hosted by the cluster:

• Darian Goldin Stahl (Concordia University, Montreal), Skin, Scan and Sign: Materializing illness as Research-Creation, 23 January 2019, in collaboration with the School of English seminar series.
• Professor Anne Villa (University of Wisconsin), Solitude and [Dis]order: Perspectives from 18th-Century French Literature and Medicine. In collaboration with the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century, School of English.
• Dr Anne Whitehead (Newcastle), “The Medical Humanities and the Question of Empathy”. In collaboration with the School of English Research Seminar Series.
• A performance of the queer lineage play Ophelia. treading water, in collaboration with the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing, School of English and part of the LGBTQ Writers’ Festival 2018.