Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Stella and Neil about Care. Key themes include: the place of self-care in contemporary writing and medical humanities; theories of care in the medical humanities and further afield; the relationship of care to narratives of illness and disability; care deficits and the long shadow that they cast in illness narratives.

Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities in the School of Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Health and Medical Humanities at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Brill/Rodopi, 2011) and of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). She has also co-edited Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) and has led “Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities”, an interdisciplinary project that examined how books, art and healthcare can be interrelated. Current research includes a practice-based project that uses creative methods inspired by the artist’s book to explore the experiences of mothers affected by historic and contemporary practices of child removal and adoption, and a new monograph on self-care in contemporary writing.

Prof Neil Vickers is professor of English literature and the health humanities at King’s College London. He’s currently on a senior research fellowship funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust to write a history of the medical humanities from the early 1960s to the present day. He’s had two careers, one in epidemiology and public health and one in literature and he tried to bring them together in his work. He is the author of Coleridge and the Doctors (2004) and Being Ill : On Sickness, Care and Abandonment (2024).