Dr Stella Bolaki
About
Stella Bolaki is Reader in American literature and Medical Humanities with interests in illness narratives and disability studies. Her recent monograph Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture explores the aesthetic, ethical and cultural importance of contemporary representations of illness across different arts and media. Through case studies on photography, artists’ books, performance art, film, theatre, animation and online narratives, it demonstrates how bringing in diverse materials and engaging with multiple perspectives can help the arts, cultural studies and the medical humanities to establish critical conversations and amplify the goals and scope of their respective work. In April 2016 she co-curated Prescriptions (Beaney Art Museum, 21 April-25 September 2016), an exhibition of artists’ books on wellbeing and medicine, with featured artist Martha A. Hall, and organised a symposium and workshop on artists’ books and the medical humanities that were funded by the Wellcome Trust. She is the Director of Kent’s MA in Medical Humanities programme, convenes Medical Humanities: An Introduction and teaches another MA course on disability and illness in American culture.