Research Seminar - Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: Experiments in Public Engagement

Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: Experiments in Public Engagement

Presented by: Prof Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford University)

Date: Thursday 31 July 2025
Time: 12-1pm
Location: Online via Zoom and in-person at the SCA Writer's Studio (Level 6, Michie Building)

Abstract

The seminar will focus on public engagement activities for two large projects Sally ran which crossed boundaries between Science, Medicine, and Literary Studies, ‘Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives’ and ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’.  As a team, we worked with artists, theatre practitioners, and museums, as well as citizen science communities.  The talk will consider the rewards, and also the challenges, of such work, and also the possibilities offered by citizen science, including manuscript transcription for historical documents. 

Presenter

Sally Shuttleworth is Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, and the English Faculty, University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division. Her research is on the interface between science, medicine, and the humanities, particularly in the nineteenth century. Her books include Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996) and The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (2010).  Between 2014 and 2019, she ran two large research projects, Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives (ERC) and Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries (AHRC), the latter in partnership with the Natural History Museum, London, the Royal Society, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Joint research works from these projects include Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019); Sleep and Stress: Past and Present, a Special Issue of the Royal Society Journal, Interface Focus (2020); Progress and Pathology: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (2020), and Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities (2020).

She has recently completed a book on travel for health, In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort. It will be published in 2026 by Oxford University Press.