• Patient-doctor interaction
• Medical uncertainty
• Illness narratives
• Contested Chronic Conditions: experiential perspectives
• Sociology of diagnosis
• Social constructions of health and illness
• Cultural, historical and gendered perspectives on medical knowledge and practice
• Medicalisation as a modern phenomena
• Qualitative research and narrative theory
• The role of theory in qualitative research
• Photography and visual research

Main current international collaborative project:

Negotiating medical uncertainty in clinical encounters: a narrative exploration of 212 naturally occurring GP consultations.

In this study, our aim is to explore how illness narratives are co-constructed within consultations between doctors and patients. Their mutual handling of medical uncertainty is emphasised. The study is based on 212 GP consultations in England, sourced from the One-in-a-Million archive in the UK. Consultations involve musculo-skeletal, psychological, digestive, cardiovascular, neurological, endocrine/metabolic and general conditions, which allows for a comparison across health and illness concerns. Qualitative interpretive inductive thematic analysis is used to explore these naturally occurring clinical consultations. In practice the analytic procedures will involve: observing and interpreting the sampled consultations; identifying factors that facilitate constructive interactions; categorising; and identifying optimum conditions for good doctor-patient relations in clinical encounters. To identify dynamic processes involved in the co-construction of illness narratives is the main aim of our study. NVivo will be used to store, structure and explore the data.

My research background is in language and literary studies. Following a BA in French and Italian at the University of Cambridge, I completed a PhD in Modern & Medieval Languages in 2012, also at the University of Cambridge. I have held teaching and research positions in the School of English at the University of Kent and, most recently, as a Departmental Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford. My interest in the Medical Humanities stems from my postdoctoral work at the University of Nottingham with the 'Hungry for Words' project, exploring arts and humanities approaches to understanding and raising awareness of eating disorders in men.

• Eating disorders, disordered eating
• Food and eating in literature
• Illness narratives
• Arts and humanities approaches in healthcare education
• Medieval literature and culture

Medical ethics

Health care ethics

Philosophy of science