Martin Willis (Project Co-Director)

Martin is a specialist in the study of literature and science from the start of the nineteenth century to the present day. He has written about mesmerism, monstrosity and mechanisation, and more recently about visual technologies and the imagination. Martin is presently working on two projects: one on medical case notes and imaginative writing, which emerged from the work he did with Keir on the Off Sick Project, and another on the essential criticism in the field of literature and science.

To find out more about Martin’s work you can find his most up to date research interests and activities at http://westminster.academia.edu/MartinWillis and his university contact details at http://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/directory/martin-willis

Keir Waddington (Project Co-Director)

A specialist in the social history of medicine and Victorian urban history, Keir has published books and articles on medicine and charity, Victorian hospitals, medical education, the history of nursing, twentieth-century psychiatry, diseased meat and sausages, and the Gothic laboratory. Having recently completed a book for Palgrave on the social history of medicine in Europe from 1500 to the present, Keir is currently looking at the nature of rural health in Victorian Wales and researching Victorian hospitals and the Gothic. As co-director of the Collaborative Study of Science, Medicine and the Imagination Research Group and through his involvement in the Off Sick project, Keir has developed his research interests on patient and hospital narratives, and in collaboration with Martin has put forward a different perspective on the role of narratives in thinking about patient and familial experiences and their historical and literary situated-ness.

To find out more about Keir’s research, visit http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/share/contactsandpeople/academicstaff/U-Z/waddington-keir-dr-overview_new.html

Richard Marsden (Research Assistant)

Richard worked on Off Sick as the project’s Research Assistant from 2010 to 2011, having previously completed his doctorate at the University of Glasgow and taught history at Cardiff University, Cardiff Metropolitan University and the Open University. As a historian his interests in the ideological uses of the past chimed well with Off Sick’s research into the ways in which carers construct and re-order their own experiences through narrative. Since Off Sick was completed, Richard has worked as a Regional Manager at the Open University and is currently employed at Cardiff University running an open access progression pathway enabling adult learners to access degrees in the historical disciplines.