Reading Bodies
Delighted to share a news feature on how public engagement activity for Reading Bodies underscores the contemporary relevance of our project research on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European literature:
Renowned author Sarah Moss set for public talk on her writing and the human body – News
Join us for a discussion with author Sarah Moss as we explore the relationship between writing, health, and the human body. This free event takes place online and is open to the public – all welcome!
Read more information about the event here: Renowned author Sarah Moss set for public talk on her writing and the human body – News
Sarah told us about her interest in the Reading Bodies project: ‘I’ve been writing and thinking about literature and the body since my PhD on 18th-century travel writing, and especially in recent fiction and life writing as I explore what bodies say without and/or against words, and how literature can almost literally shape our bodies, especially in relation to girls’ reading and eating. My interest in writing, food and bodies wanders from 18th-century ships to modern and historical kitchens, from human remains in museums to ghosts on the mountains’.
The Reading Bodies project aims to challenge common assumptions about burnout by fostering communication and a sense of community through creativity. One of the main goals of the Reading Bodies: Burnout, Overload, and Resilience creative anthology – published in collaboration with Riptide Journal (2024) – was to help reduce social stigma through language and artistic expression.
To understand the impact of the anthology, we shared feedback forms with participants to learn if and how their attitudes and behaviours toward burnout had changed since taking part in the project.
By measuring the data from these feedback forms, we have identified key impacts such as building community and behavioural change. For example, 80% of respondents said that when reading the anthology, they felt a sense of shared experience and community. Additionally, a further 80% of respondents said that by contributing to the anthology, they have an increased willingness to share ideas and experiences about burnout, overload, and resilience.
‘[The anthology] creates a powerful sense of solidarity, care and community amongst people who will never meet but share solidarity through creativity.’
Anthology Contributor
‘[The book] being made and out in the world is a very empowering feeling.’
Anthology Contributor
You can read the digital version of the anthology as a flipbook and via our website here. You can also find the anthology on the Behavioural and Cultural Insights Hub, a knowledge-sharing platform for healthy practices developed in collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for Europe.
To read an interview with Katharine Murphy and Olivia Glaze discussing the public engagement initiatives from the Reading Bodies project, please click here.
We plan to apply insights from the anthology on the language used to describe feelings of burnout to develop resources that help medical professionals better understand patient experiences.
We hope the project will inspire further conversations about the importance of health and mental health in our personal and professional lives.
As part of our Reading Bodies public engagement initiative, Dr Olivia Glaze hosted two creative writing sessions in London which focused on the theme of the body.
The first ‘Writing Bodies’ session took place at the Battersea Arts Centre on 7 November 2024, followed by the second session at St Marylebone Parish Church on 20 February 2025. These events provided a welcoming space for participants to explore or enhance their creative writing skills while fostering a sense of community.
Participants created a variety of writing styles, including fiction, personal essays, poetry, and haikus, focusing on themes such as ageing, illness, and body confidence. They also offered thoughtful feedback on each other’s writing, fostering a supportive and collaborative writing environment.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who attended and shared their creativity with us! We hope you continue to write and explore your storytelling journey.
Prof. Katharine Murphy and Dr Olivia Glaze will be presenting research relating to the Reading Bodies project at the forthcoming Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland 70th Annual Conference in Edinburgh, 7-8 April 2025. Our papers are part of a panel on ‘Cultural Portrayals of Illnesses and Disabilities in the Modern Luso-Hispanic World’, in collaboration with academics in Hispanic and Portuguese Studies at the University of Leeds.
Our research findings for Reading Bodies will also be presented at TONGUES: Medical Humanities across linguistic and cultural frontiers, the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Congress, 21-23 May 2025 (online).
Our forthcoming Special Issue on ‘Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1970s)’, guest edited by Katharine Murphy and Olivia Glaze, is scheduled for publication by the Journal of Romance Studies later in 2025. This extended volume seeks to contribute to the rapidly emerging field of Multilingual Medical Humanities and will include articles on illness narratives in Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian cultural texts. Watch this space for updates!
We’re delighted to share our Reading Bodies: Burnout, Overload and Resilience creative anthology, published in collaboration with Riptide Journal (2024). You can read the digital version as a flipbook and via our website here.
The volume presents fiction, poetry and artwork inspired by our research themes and explores how creativity can unlock different perspectives on burnout and resilience. For more information about this initiative, please visit our blog post about the creative workshop we held in June 2024.
The Reading Bodies anthology features on the Behavioural and Cultural Insights Hub, a knowledge-sharing platform for healthy practices developed in collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for Europe.
Local artist Molly Saunders has illustrated the themes of our Reading Bodies creative workshop in preparation for our forthcoming anthology with Riptide Journal. We’re pleased to share the series of images that have resulted from this collaboration below:
Molly took part in our creative workshop on 14 June 2024, producing live illustrations as the basis for the final images. You can find more details about her work here.
Artist Katharine Howell has illustrated the Reading Bodies collaborative process with Riptide Journal, in preparation for our forthcoming anthology on Burnout, Overload and Resilience. We’re delighted to share her illustration below:
You can find more information about the artist here.
By Dr Sally Flint, Project Partner for Reading Bodies and Creative Lead for We Are the Possible
‘We need / To leap / Right now / To the next stage / Of our evolution.’
Ben Okri
Burnout, Overload, and Resilience are words that in 2024 challenge analysis in literature, healthcare, and the media, especially alongside trending headlines which can often include crisis, doomsday, disaster, pollution, guilt, greenwashing, catastrophe, apocalypse, anxiety – all used to stress the global climate emergency, and the need to urgently change the way we consume and live. It’s like being in a crammed washing machine of words on a fast spin of environmental and societal problems. A recent article shows that neurologists are ‘alarmed’: ‘Everybody has a Breaking Point’: how the climate crisis affects our brains’ (C. P. Aldern, Guardian, 2024). While writing this, the latest pop-up on my PC reads – ‘but don’t confuse burnout with being busy!’
Therefore, it was intriguing and timely to deliver a creative writing workshop where we can create a collection of writing inspired by the Reading Bodies project using Burnout, Overload and Resilience as launch pads. To do this, as a writer, editor, and creative writing lecturer working at the interface of science, health, education, translation, and the arts, I adapted a workshop and editing methodology I established to ‘share insights across languages and academic disciplines.’ At the workshop, we considered different approaches to the theme of burnout, including workplace and caring pressures, strategies for dealing with stress, and connections with individual health.
I used a unique collaborative creative writing approach developed in 2017 when working with Met Office scientists on ways to communicate climate data to the public through the arts and science. On a NERC-funded yearlong project, Climate Stories, led by renowned climate scientist Professor Peter Stott, a group of climate scientists and art practitioners shared and experimented with narrative forms. Both willing and wary, we joined in creative writing, performance, printmaking, and music workshops. As the Creative Writing Lead, I encouraged writing that ‘showed’ working in the field of climate change, and the scientists’ stories that erupted were startling, from ice cracking in the Arctic to fleeing forest fires in South America. This storytelling approach helped scientists understand how using the senses to explain data – what they could see, hear, taste, touch, and smell – brought to life what it’s really like on the frontline of climate change.
Then, as the Covid crisis spread and the world stalled, Cecilia Mañosa Nyblon (Director, We Are the Possible, University of Exeter), had an inspired vision to bring together science, health, education, translation, and the arts to communicate to broad audiences how human health relies on maintaining, restoring and protecting planetary health and ecosystems. Following a unique creative and editorial process, a collection of poems was published, and with the support of the Met Office UK, we delivered One Chance Left – 12 poems co-created by climate scientists and health professionals at an event in the first-ever Science Pavilion at the COP26 climate conference (Glasgow 2021). The poems, underpinned by science and health research, received such a positive reaction that by 2022 our team had grown to include not only scientists and health professionals, but educators, translators, youth leaders, and artists in the UK and Egypt, using a now proven creative collaborative way of working which resulted in We Still Have a Chance – 12 stories for 12 days of COP27 (Egypt 2022) which reached over 28 million people and counting.
