Dr Andrew Mangham

Biography

Dr. Andrew Mangham is currently working as a Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, University of Reading , United Kingdom. Responsibilities Co-Director, Health Humanities Research Group, Director, MA English Areas of Interest My primary research area is the intersection between literature and medicine in the nineteenth century. I began my research career by looking at the links between Victorian conceptions of female psychopathology, the insanity plea in criminal courts, and sensation fiction. Since then I've published a monograph on Charles Dickens and forensic medicine and I'm currently writing a book about the physiology of starvation and the Victorian social problem novel. My work has concentrated on the intellectual and methodological elements that literature and medicine have shared in history. I'm also interested in the gothic, realism, ideas of sexuality and health, real crime, and popular fiction. I always welcome new enquiries about PhD supervision. I am co-director of the Health Humanities Cluster, an interdisciplinary group of researchers from across the University. We are interested in the ways the arts and humanities intersect with the questions asked by the sciences of health and wellbeing. As a group, we undertake regular research and public-engagement activities around three major themes: life transition; minds, bodies and sickness; and monsters and the monstrous. Through these interlinking and interdisciplinary areas, we explore some of the most important subjects in health enquiry today, from the phenomenology of sickness, the effects and perceptions of ageing, to cultural understandings of physiological variation. For more information, please follow the link above and/or follow us on Twitter @healthhums Within the Department of English Literature, I teach modules on literature and medicine, Dickens, the gothic, and Victorian literature.    

Research Interest

My primary research area is the intersection between literature and medicine in the nineteenth century. I began my research career by looking at the links between Victorian conceptions of female psychopathology, the insanity plea in criminal courts, and sensation fiction.