Postgraduate and Early Career Research

The MHRC has invested heavily in developing the next generation of researchers in the medical humanities. It offers intensive support before, during and after the application process to prestigious funding schemes from the AHRC, Wellcome Trust, and British Academy. The development and training of early career researchers has also been facilitated by support from the College of Arts & Humanities and Wellcome Trust, including the Wellcome-funded Glasgow Medical Humanities Network.

 

Postgraduate Research

  • Postgraduate students can study medical humanities in a variety of Subject areas within and across the College of Arts & Humanities and the wider University. Interdisciplinary collaborations are a key feature of the medical humanities at University of Glasgow. These extend across the University of Glasgow (e.g. with Subject areas in Social Science, Medicine, and Science and Engineering), and beyond, to cross-institutional supervision with University of Stirling (English Studies) and University of Edinburgh (Science, Technology and Innovation Studies).
  • The MHRC continues to support successful applications to postgraduate funding schemes administered by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities and by Wellcome Trust. Successful applicants have included projects on mental illness and experimental form in post-1965 women's writing (Zoe Slater, Wellcome Trust), chronic heart disease in post-1980 literature (Laura Donald, Wellcome Trust) stigmatised health conditions in contemporary Scottish Literature (Sarah Spence, Wellcome Trust), the medical history of the refugee camp (Jennifer Carr, Wellcome Trust), and the narrative legacies of 'total pain' in end of life care (Joe Wood, SGSAH DTP).
  • Medical humanities PhDs have also been funded within the College of Arts & Humanities by the University Lord Kelvin Adam Smith scholarship scheme, including a project on physical and mental health in the life and work of Robert Burns (Dr Moira Hansen) and the work of the twentieth-century Glaswegian psychiatrist T. Ferguson Rodger (Dr Sarah Phelan). 
  • The MHRC helps to support a lively research environment for postgraduate medical humanities, including a discussion group organised by the Medical Humanities ECR group (@medecr), and SGSAH-supported inititiatives, such as a Scottish Medical Humanities Doctoral Research Network and their conference Public Health Private Illness.

Early Career Research

  • The MHRC continues to support applicants to postdoctoral schemes from British Academy, Wellcome Trust, and Leverhulme Trust. Successful applicants have included projects on literature and medicine in the nineteenth-century periodical press (Wellcome Trust, Research Fellowship, Dr Megan Coyer); literary cocainism (Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship, Dr Douglas Small); medical and practical ethics in Galen (Wellcome Trust University Award, Dr Sophia Xenofontos); and pregnancy in science fiction (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr Anna McFarlane).
  • The MHRC supports the development of applications from early-career researchers who are principal investigator on smaller externally funded projects, including visiting fellowships. Projects have included: R.D. Laing's language and healing (Wellcome Trust Research Bursary, Dr Adrian Chapman); the psychiatrist Ronald Sandison's post-war experiments with LSD therapy (Wellcome Trust Research Bursary, Dr Mark Gallagher); and socio-economic rehabilitation of First World War wounded at Erskine Hospitals (Wellcome Trust Research Bursary, Dr Jen Novotny); nursing in Naomi Mitchison's science fiction (Wellcome Trust Small Grant, Dr Anna McFarlane); and cocaine and the image of the Victorian Physician (Wellcome Trust Small Grant, Dr Douglas Small)
  • The MHRC also supports future career development through research assistant posts on project teams, such as the Glasgow Medical Humanities Network, the Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project, and the Cullen Project.