Reading Bodies
The Reading Bodies project has been selected as one of ten projects to help launch the new University Council for Languages Research Database (Autumn 2025) — a tool designed to connect languages research with policymakers in an accessible and practical way.
For more information, please visit our Impact & Policy page.
We are excited to launch the Reading Bodies ‘takeover’ of The Polyphony, ‘a web platform that aims to stimulate, catalyse, provoke, expand and intensify conversations in the critical medical humanities’, hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University.
In the opening piece today, Katharine Murphy introduces the Reading Bodies takeover and discusses what historical discourses of illness in European literatures and cultures contribute to the medical humanities: Historical Narratives of Illness in the Multilingual Medical Humanities – the polyphony
The ‘takeover’ presents five connected pieces, each of which will be published on consecutive days this week (20th to 24th October 2025), and is edited by Jordan McCullough. We invite you to follow the series!
More information is available on our Publications page.
A collection of articles by the project research network for an extended special issue of Journal of Romance Studies 25.3 (2025), 293-530 on ‘Reading bodies: Narrating illness in European literatures and cultures (1870s to 1960s and beyond)’, edited by Katharine Murphy and Olivia Glaze, is now published! For more information about project outputs, please visit our Publications page.
We are excited to launch The Burnout Booklet: A Health Resource for Patients and Practitioners, an Impact & Policy output for this project.
Read more about the project in the University news: Language scholars produce illustrated health booklet on burnout – News
If you would like to provide brief feedback on the booklet, please leave your comments via the following link:
As we reach the final stages of the Reading Bodies grant, here are some reflections on the shape, scope and challenges of the project over the last 20 months:
This AHRC-funded multilingual project has sought to address the under-representation of Hispanic Studies research in the wider field of Medical Humanities. To achieve this objective, the project has facilitated exchanges with specialists working on literary and cultural representations of health and illness in French, Portuguese, Italian and German Studies. It includes the following highlights:
If you’re interested in learning more about these activities and the wider field of Multilingual Medical Humanities, please follow our Reading Bodies Multilingual Network on Bluesky.
Thank you so much to everyone who attended our In Conversation event on 7 May with acclaimed author Sarah Moss. We were thrilled to host Sarah as she delivered a generous reading from her recent work, My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir.
The conversation, led by Katharine Murphy, explored a wide range of topics, including the intricacies of writing about the body and illness, whether writing can serve a therapeutic purpose, and the formal challenges of life writing and fiction.
Attendees engaged meaningfully during the Q&A session, chaired by Laura Salisbury, asking insightful questions about the literary references in Sarah’s work, the balance between writing and day-to-day life, and how to maintain a regular writing practice.
The event was well-attended by academics and members of the public. Feedback included:
‘I personally love hearing tales from the intersection of motherhood, creativity, and academia.’
‘It was wonderful, and helped me think afresh about writing, resilience, and the therapeutic.’
‘This was absolutely fascinating!.’
‘[I enjoyed] the introduction to this wonderful research and the links to explore more.’
Watch the recording of the event here:
The public engagement activities for Reading Bodies have considered the present-day relevance of historical discourses about illness, health and the body. Echoing our project research findings, Sarah Moss reflected on the ways in which reading literary texts from the past provide a way into exploring illness in her own writing, exemplified by an array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary intertexts in her book My Good Bright Wolf. She explained that her novel Bodies of Light, although set in the nineteenth century, comments on health inequalities past and present, including contemporary pressures on the NHS. During our conversation, Sarah also expanded on her critical response to contemporary theories of resilience. Underscoring the importance of recognising the impact of social determinants of health, she commented that resilience is:
‘a term that really risks transferring structural problems to individuals; […] I’m very skeptical of anything that seeks to require individuals to resolve structural problems in their own bodies or in their own mind’.
We were so pleased to have the chance to discuss the findings of our project research on reading illness in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European literatures and cultures with a contemporary author who has written so extensively on the body. As we noted in the introduction to this event, Sarah’s work:
‘speaks profoundly to the questions of what it means to write and to read embodiment, including in states of illness and distress. Her close attention to the texture of lived experience also traces out how aesthetic forms might create new conditions, both for understanding and potentially for wellbeing’.
Pre-order Sarah Moss’s new book, Ripeness, here: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/sarah-moss/ripeness/9781529035490
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).
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.
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.