Engaging Medical and Digital Humanities through Literary Studies
"The collaborative work with the actors transformed my research on medical topographies into a public event and made it accessible to a wide audience. Besides the fascinating experience of seeing a text come to life, I very much enjoyed the fact that, in this way, a public theatre production appreciated and could benefit from my expertise as literary scholar."
(credit: Kamal Prashar)
Department member Dr Annja Neumann has been nominated for the inaugural Public Engagement with Research Awards. Her research on medical topographics is at the intersection of Literary Studies, Medical Humanities and Digital Humanities. In collaboration with artists, academics and different public groups, she led a series of engagement activities which pursued three 'Pathways to Impact' for the Schnitzler Digital Edition Project. This includes the theatre production of Arthur Schnitzler's medical drama Professor Bernhardi at Barts Pathology Museum. The performance was accompanied by a public discussion on 'Dying Well: Enacting Medical Ethics'. It facilitated a dialogue between medical practitioners, policy-makers, journalists, patient representatives, academics, medical students and other members of the public to consider what it means in today's world to 'die well'. The third initiative used the crowdsourcing activity 'Transcribing Schnitzler' to engage members of the public across different generations in Schnitzler's unpublished drafts.
More details about past and upcoming public engagement activities can be found on the Schnitzler Digital Edition Project webpage.
*Annja Neumann on the dramaturgical work with theatre ensemble [Foreign Affairs]
