WELLCOME TRUST RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP LOSING FACE?

? LIVING WITH DISFIGUREMENT IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE (2012-2015) Dr Patricia Skinner This project will examine the medical and social responses to traumatic head and face injury in early medieval Europe. Using a wide variety of textual material, including chronicles, law codes and court cases from western Europe and the Byzantine empire, it seeks to analyse how such injuries were presented in the sources, the potential for medical (and surgical) intervention and care, and the social implications of disfigurement for the status of the individual. The project was inspired by modern instances of facial disfigurement of women research into the medieval sources will interrogate the a relationship between disfigurement and loss of status, most explicitly expressed in political and judicial mutilations from the sixth century onwards, and if so whether this was gendered. ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL SCIENCE IN CULTURE EXPLORATORY AWARD THE ROLE OF IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE IN CLINICIANS PROFESSIONAL LIVES: TOWARDS A RANDOMIZED CONTROL TRIAL (2012) Professor Anne Borsay This project wishes to explore the possible differences a taught course in literary reading might make to clinicians in their professional lives and how any such differences might be measured. To this end, two interdisciplinary methodological workshops will be convened which will lay the ground for a randomized control trial involving a taught and an untaught group who will read the same literary works in the same sequence over a one year period. WELLCOME TRUST AWARD THALIDOMIDE: AN ORAL HISTORY (2012-2013) Professor Anne Borsay This project is a development of the 2011 Scoping Exercise to identify sources for the history of thalidomide. Whilst some accounts exist, full testimonies of those impaired by the drug have never been taken. Fifty years after their mothers were prescribed thalidomide, this oral history study will allow these people to tell their stories and make the recordings and transcripts available online as a resource for future research and public interest. This project is supported by the Wellcome Trust. WELLCOME TRUST PROGRAMME AWARD - DISABILITY AND INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY: A COMPARATIVE CULTURAL HISTORY OF BRITISH COALFIELDS, 1780-1948 Professor Anne Borsay Disability and Industrial Society is a Swansea-led project which uses the coal industry to explore how understandings and experiences of disability were affected by industrialization between 1780 and the end of

College of Human and Health Sciences, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK

the Second World War. It is co-directed by Professor Anne Borsay and Dr David Turner, in collaboration with Aberystwyth, Northumbria and Strathclyde Universities. The approach is a comparative one, with a focus on three coalfields in south Wales, the north east of England and Scotland. A methodology fusing social and cultural history is being applied to an extensive portfolio of primary sources, ranging from parliamentary papers and official reports to diaries and imaginative literature. A team of research associates at Aberystwyth, Northumbria and Strathclyde have begun conducting this work and they will be joined in 2012 by two research fellows and a PhD student at Swansea; Dr Kirsti Bohata will supervise the studentship. A two-volume comparative history of disability in the coal industry will be published, together with articles and conference papers. To connect with disabled, professional and lay audiences, Dr Andrew Hull will oversee a programme of public engagement events, which will be held in each coalfield. An exhibition will tour Wales in partnership with the National Waterfront Museum. WELLCOME TRUST RESEARCH LEAVE FRANOIS RABELAIS: MEDICAL HUMANIST (2011-2012) Dr Alison Williams The project will investigate the fictional works of Franois Rabelais and his private correspondence in order to demonstrate how his professional medical knowledge informed his approach to writing fiction and his ambitions for what his books might achieve amongst his readers. The primary texts for consideration are Pantagruel, Gargantua, Le Tiers Livre, Le Quart Livre, Le Cinquiesme Livre, despite the latters contested authorship, and correspondence such as Rabelaiss letters from Italy. The first section of the book will analyse the presentation of various medical fields in these texts. The second part of the project will address health promotion via pharmacology, humour and literature as therapy. Theories of humour, studies of doctor-patient relationships and of the therapeutic value of the arts will underpin an investigation of how Rabelais uses his works to encourage physical and mental wellbeing in his readers. This project is supported by Wellcome Trust Research Leave. WELLCOME TRUST PEOPLE AWARD THALIDOMIDE: A SCOPING EXERCISE (2011) Professor Anne Borsay The birth of babies damaged by the drug, thalidomide, was one of Europe's worst man-made disasters in peacetime. This collaborative project with the Thalidomide Society and the Thalidomide Trust will employ a research assistant to survey archives, libraries and museums, and identify documents, visual images, oral histories and artefacts that tell the thalidomide story. The database recording these materials will then be used to support applications for public engagement and research activities. This project is supported by a Wellcome Trust People Award.

College of Human and Health Sciences, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK

AHRC FELLOWSHIP IMAGINING DISABILITY IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (2010-11) Dr David Turner This project is exploring how physical disability was defined, understood and discussed in England between 1660 and 1830. Cultural representations of disability will be examined alongside the testimonies of disabled people themselves to see how they made sense of their experiences; and the dominant historical assumption that the period witnessed a transformation in perceptions of disability from a religious to a medical model will be challenged. The research will form a book to be published by Routledge. WELLCOME TRUST PROJECT AWARD MEDICINE IN THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (2008-11) Dr Dan Healey with Dr Kirill Rossianov of the Russian Academy of Sciences This project is investigating the history of medicine under the extreme conditions of Joseph Stalin's concentration camps. It will show how doctors and medicine were integral to these far-flung places of confinement between the 1930s and the 1950s, and ask how the Gulag experience affected Soviet medicine more generally. The work of the Soviet prison and labour camp physicians will also be compared with that of the infamous doctors in the Nazi concentration camps in order to clarify what was distinctive about Gulag medicine. ROYAL COLLEGE OF NURSING WALES PhD STUDENTSHIP THE ROLE OF POLITICAL INFLUENCE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NURSING IN WALES, 1948-1998 (2007-2010) Professor Anne Borsay with Andrea Jones This PhD is a collaboration between Royal College of Nursing Wales and College of Human and Health Sciences, which looks at the political influence of lead nurses in Wales between the creation of the National Health Service in 1948 and the devolution of healthcare issues to the Welsh Assembly Government in 1998. The use of historical methodology is undeveloped in nursing research, where social science methodologies have dominated since the 1970s. This project places primary materials in particular, official documents from government bodies and professional organizations, and contemporary journal and newspaper articles within their broader historical context, and draws on the unique resource of oral testimony of retired nurse leaders in Wales to shed further light on how nursing engaged with the decisionmaking processes that shaped policy and practice.

College of Human and Health Sciences, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK