Staff Members
Dr Angela Woods
(email at angela.woods@durham.ac.uk)
Biography
I am an interdisciplinary medical humanities researcher working at the intersection of cultural theory, philosophy and literary studies, and Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, a three-year interdisciplinary study of voice-hearing funded by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award.
I completed my PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, where I also lectured in Postmodernism and was the lead curriculum designer of Australia's first interdisciplinary coursework degree for doctoral students. My first book, The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory, was published in 2011, and my current research interests include the interplay between theoretical and subjective accounts of psychotic experience; new modes of 'doing interdisciplinarity' (such as critical neuroscience); narrative identity; and the role of narrative in the medical humanities. I am the founder and editor of the Centre for Medical Humanities blog, to which I regularly contribute.
Research Groups
Recent Invited Conference Papers & Presentations
- Woods, A. “Taxonomies of Voice-Hearing,” invited plenary at the Hearing Voices Symposium, Stanford University, 13 April 2013. Video available here.
- Woods, A and Patricia Waugh. “Pathologies of the Postmodern,” Café Philosophique, Newcastle, 18 March 2013. Podcast available here.
- Woods, A. “Anti-psychiatry and its legacies in cultural theory,” invited presentation and panel discussion, “Anti-psychiatry and its legacies,” Nottingham Contemporary, 13 February 2013.” Video available here.
- Woods, A. “Schizophrenia: The Future of Our Fascination,” invited seminar for the Centre for Values Ethics and Law in Medicine, University of Sydney, 3 July 2012.
- Woods, A. “Why Schizophrenia is not Like Improvisational Jazz: On the Use of Clinical Concepts in Cultural Theory,” invited plenary at The Art Of Madness Clinical Study Days presented by the Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups, The Philadelphia Lacan Study Group and the Fordham University Department of English, New York, April 2012.
- Woods, A. “Structures of Depressive Experience in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist and Melancholia,” invited plenary at The Phenomenology of Depression: A Workshop, University of Osnabruck, March 2012.
Supervision
- Mr Jan Pedersen (from October 2011)
- Mrs Hannah Bowden (from January 2012)
- Ms Roz Oates (from May 2013)
Publications
Books: authored
- Woods, A. (2011). The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory. Oxford.: Oxford University Press.
Books: sections
- Woods, A. (2012). Beyond the Wounded Storyteller: Rethinking Narrativity, Illness and Embodied Self-Experience. In Health, Illness and Disease: Philosophical Essays. Carel, H. & Cooper, R. Newcastle.: Acumen.
Journal papers: academic
- Woods, A. (2011). 'I suffer in an unknown manner that is hieroglyphical’. Jung and Babette en route to Freud and Schreber. History of the Present 1(2): 244-258.
- Woods, A. (2011). Memoir and the Diagnosis of Schizophrenia: Reflections on The Centre Cannot Hold; Me, Myself, and Them; and the ‘Crumbling Twin Pillars’ of Kraepelinian Psychiatry. Mental Health Review 16(3): 102-106.
- Woods, A. (2011). The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical Humanities. Medical Humanities 37(2): 73-78.
Grants Awarded
- 2011: IAS Workshop on voice hearing (£4366.00 from Wellcome Trust)