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Institute for Medical Humanities
Art by Lonfeldt


 

 

Research Themes

Our research into hidden experiences of health and illness between 2025 and 2027 will span six interdisciplinary research strands.

Violence, Trauma and Memory

Exploring how violence, trauma, and memory shape our understanding of the human condition across time, culture, and experience.
Water and paint droplets on a cracked glass pane

Weather, Climate and Health

Bridging the gap between environmental and medical humanities with interdisciplinary research on weather, climate crises and health.
Clouds viewed from above against a dark sky

Gender, Affective Injustice and Health

Investigating how gender norms, stereotypes and social expectations unjustly shape people’s affective experiences and their interpretation in healthcare settings.
Hope II Gustav Klimt

Spirituality, Health and Wellbeing

Exploring contemporary understandings of spirituality and its links with health and well-being across different religious traditions and historical contexts.
Prayer Flags with a mountain in the background

The Beginning and End of Life

Bringing Interdisciplinary and cross-sector approaches to the key questions for medicine, law, ethics and society raised by the beginning and end of life.
Open doorways with clouds

AI and Medical Humanities

Using medical humanities approaches and methods to explore how AI technologies reshape medical practice, patient narratives and healthcare relationships.
A superimposition of colourful illustrations representing different objects in a secretariat: in the background, printed minutes. Above, the hands of a medical secretary typing on her keyboard, the hands of another stamping envelopes. The headset and foot pedal in the foreground are essential tools for typing. In the foreground, the red zig-zags typical of ambient scribe errors streak across.

 

 

These research themes replace the six strands supported by the IMH between 2018 and 2023: Embodied Symptoms; Thinking, Feeling & Imagining; Fringe Cognition; Everyday Environments; The Science of Human Experience and Critical Concepts.

You can find out more about our research activity from 2018 to 2023 by reading the brochure The Institute for Medical Humanities: 2018–2023.