Wellbeing, Literature, and Lived Experience

How have people thought and felt about health and wellbeing across history? How can we access and interpret such lived experiences? How could reading, writing or storytelling and listening affect wellbeing?

Poems, plays, short stories, novels, memoirs, biographies, chronicles, advice manuals, textbooks, letters, social media posts, and other textual expressions provide compelling evidence. Through these we can investigate the vast range of narratives, observations, beliefs, reflections, and affective responses connected to the bodily and mental states and processes that inform the experience of health. Researchers in the Wellbeing, Literature, and Lived Experience (WELL) group explore the ways in which critical literary investigation can both reveal knowledge and query discourses of health, illness, and disability over the centuries, and inspire practices that can assist wellbeing in our age.

Projects

Licensing ‘Lechecraft’: Medical Regulation and Patient Scepticism in Late-Medieval England NWO VENI Grant ( VI.Veni.221C.045 )

Scepticism of patients towards medical science is not a modern phenomenon. In late-medieval England, many patients had little faith in professional medicine, and increasingly turned to unauthorized and unqualified healers. Yet attempts at regulation did not help to regain the lost confidence of disaffected patients. This project investigates the causes of patient scepticism in late-medieval England and the ways in which legislators attempted to regain their trust. I will do so by examining previously unstudied medieval manuscripts in tandem with source materials often overlooked in the history of medicine, such as literature and legal documents.

The UPLIFT project: Unlocking the Potential of Literature for Thriving

The UPLIFT project aims to answer the overarching question of how engagements with diverse literary texts – from reading novels to writing poetry – can reduce threats to well-being and facilitate thriving in specific social groups (e.g. in Dutch healthcare institutions). This question will be answered by investigating the perceived effects of various text types used in reading- and writing-based activities. Data from these organised literary activities will, furthermore, help us construct a differentiated conceptual framework of the “eudaimonic” potentials of literary engagement.

Researchers

• Dr Ann Hoag investigates representations of embodiment in 20th and 21st century travel writing and migrant fiction and how moving across cultural borders influences expressed experiences of corporeality and the changing dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, and health.  She is also a co-supervisor of the PhD project UPLIFT: Unlocking the Potential of Literature for Thriving.

• Prof Megan Leitch is interested in the intersections of embodiment and wellbeing in medieval English literature and culture. Her work on the medical humanities has included her monograph Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature: Emotions, ethics, dreams (Manchester University Press, 2021; paperback, 2023), which explores how the subject of sleep interlaces medical, moral, and imaginative discourses in the Middle Ages, and establishes sleep’s significance for medieval approaches to mental health. She has also been PI on an interdisciplinary project on ‘The Medieval Future of Sleep’, funded by the Welsh government, which considers the potential of medieval sleep strategies and hygiene practices for improving wellbeing.

• Dr Ashley Maher investigates how new models of animal welfare have been used to imagine best practices for improving human welfare. In her first book, Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State (Oxford University Press, 2020), she did this through examining how modernist architects, spurred by commissions for animal housing at the London Zoo, worked alongside the developers of the British welfare state to envision housing that would promote human health and democratic participation–and how British novelists developed their own rival models of individual welfare in response. Her current project considers how zoological models of kinship, welfare, and community were adapted not only by wartime and postwar governments and NGOs but also by midcentury authors intent on developing new literary strategies to address the delicate balance between individual and collective wellbeing. Her work on this project has been supported by funding from the Culture & Animals Foundation and the Dutch Research Council, along with a short-term visiting research fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford.

• Dr Tekla Mecsnóber is interested in how participatory creative writing and reading practices may be relevant to individual and social wellbeing. She is one of the initiators and supervisors of the PhD project UPLIFT: Unlocking the Potential of Literature for Thriving.  

• Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen and co-director of the Netherlands Winter School on Narrative. His research focuses on the social and cognitive affordances of the use of narrative in a variety of settings and contexts (career counselling, cultural heritage, medicine, wicked problems). His current project—Storyteasing: Narrative Literacy and Conspiracy Theories—assesses how our narrative literacy can be trained to build resilience vis a vis disruptive narrative practices such as conspiracy theorizing. He coedited special issues of Narrative Inquiry (“Applied Narratology,” 2024), and Journal of Narrative Theory (“Narrative Literacy,” 2025), as well as the volume Narrative Values, the Value of Narratives (2024).

• Dr Patrick Outhwaite is a medieval literary scholar who takes an interdisciplinary approach to the history of medicine, combining insights from book history, legal studies and the medical humanities. His NWO VENI project, Licensing ‘Lechecraft’, explores the part that patient scepticism played in expediting medical regulation in late-medieval England. He also explores the intersections of religion and medicine in late-medieval Central European contexts.

• Dr Barbara Postema is a comics scholar who has been developing an interest in graphic medicine and working conditions of comics creators. With Janina Wildfeuer, she co-organized the conference Graphic Medicine in October 2024, hosted at the University of Groningen, and currently they are co-editing a special issue on graphic medicine for the journal Critical Humanities. Dr Postema is planning a research project where she will trace how cartoonists’ working conditions were affected by lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how their comics reflected the pandemic. She is a member of the advisory board for Graphic Medicine Europe (https://graphicmedicine.eu/).

PhD projects

• Xenia Dees is interested in the intersection of medicine, literature, and psychology. In her PhD, the UPLIFT project, she examines how literary engagement impacts human well-being (eudaimonia) in various social contexts, particularly in medical settings.

• Diedelot Denessen researches lovesickness in the Dutch Enlightenment culture of psychosomatic medicine. She considers how early modern literary sources, such as theatre and poetry interacted with medical texts to shape experiences of lovesickness and ideas about the female body.

• Stijn Zelhorst studies the role reading fiction can play in inducing the integration and acceptance of Dutch gender-inclusive pronouns. He focuses on novel reading as an opportunity for extensive exposure to genderqueer characters and gender-inclusive language, and is interested in its potential for queer emancipation and language change.