New IMH Co-Director

The IMH is delighted to announce the appointment of a new IMH Co-Director, Professor Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Professor of Italian Studies, School of Modern Languages and Cultures).

Katrin brings a wealth of research and leadership experience to the role and a particular passion for bringing greater linguistic and cultural diversity to medical humanities, to supporting PGR students, and to developing research projects and programmes in connection to her work on trauma, narrative, cognition and epigenetics.

Katrin will start officially in her new role on 1 January 2026.

About Katrin Wehling-Giorgi

Katrin Wehling-Giorgi is Professor of Italian Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, where she also acts as Co-Director of Postgraduate Research. Her research engages with twentieth-century and contemporary Italian literature from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, with a specific interest in gender studies, visual culture, trauma and cultural memory, motherhood, and constructions of subjectivity and space. Together with Corinne Saunders, she has co-led the IMH’s Violence, Trauma and Memory Research Theme since 2024.

Katrin has published extensively on constructs of motherhood and subjectivity in post-1960s women writers, and her research in this area has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She has co-edited six volumes on contemporary female-authored narrative, including an edited book on Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing (2022). Her current monograph project, entitled Maternal Legacies: Epigenetics and the Literature of Transgenerational Trauma, investigates the productive entanglements between female-authored narratives of trauma and a key concern of recent epigenetic theory: the role played by maternal experience in the intergenerational transmission of trauma, whilst foregrounding embodied and relational modes of storytelling across Italian and transnational contexts. Her first monograph, Gadda and Beckett: Storytelling, Subjectivity and Fracture (2014), was the runner-up of the Gadda First Prize.

Explore Katrin Wehling-Giorgi's research and publications