Professor Clark Lawlor

Professor

Department: Humanities

ADSS Clarklower Facultystaff 255 I studied English literature at the University of Oxford before specialising in eighteenth-century literature for my MA and PhD at the University of Warwick, although I also retained an interest in American Literature. I then spent a year teaching at Northumbria University as a Visiting Lecturer before taking up post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Aberdeen for three years, where I worked in the field of literature and medicine. After that I spent a year doing further post-doctoral research at the Johns Hopkins University in the USA and Oxford University, UK. I then returned to Newcastle and, having taught at both Northumbria and Newcastle Universities for a year, I took up a full post at Northumbria in 2000. I became a Reader in 2007 and a Professor in 2013. I have published widely in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and am reviewer and referee for several international journals and major presses in the areas of literature and/or the history of medicine. I have been Principal Investigator for two Major Leverhulme projects: Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832 (2013-2016), and Writing Doctors: Representation and Medical Personality ca. 1660-1832 (2018-2021).

Campus Address

Office: Lipman 106 (Institute of the Humanities)

Email Clark

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

I research literary and artistic representations and their effects on the realities of medicine, and vice-versa. My core periods are the 'long eighteenth century' and Romantic periods, but I have written on cultural histories of disease, especially, consumption/tuberculosis, and melancholia and depression, from Classical times to the present day. I show how literary templates help to construct social percpetions and therefore lived experience of diseases. I have been involved in, or run, Leverhulme Trust major research projects on depression, fashionable diseases, and medical writings. See the following:PI Writing Doctors: Representation and Medical Personality ca. 1660-1832 http://writingdoctors.info/ A Leverhulme Trust Major Project; PI Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832 http://www.fashionablediseases.info/ A Leverhulme Trust Major Project; Co-Director Before Depression: Representation and Culture of the English Malady, 1660-1800 (2006-9), £223,000 www.beforedepression.com.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Myth and (Mis)information: Constructing the Medical Professions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Culture , Ingram, A., Lawlor, C., Williams, H. 16 Apr 2024
Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century, Lawlor, C., Mangham, A. 3 Jun 2021
Romantic Consumption: The Paradox of Fashionable Breath, Lawlor, C. 2021, The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine, Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan
Sleep and Stress Management in Enlightenment Literature and Poetry, Lawlor, C., Blackwood, A. 6 Jun 2020, In: Interface Focus
'Chaos dark and deep': Grotesque selves and self-fashioning in Pope's Dunciad, Lawlor, C. 2019, Writing and constructing the self in Great Britain in the long eighteenth century, Manchester University Press
‘The gloom of anxiety’: fear in the long eighteenth century’, Lawlor, C., Ingram, A. 1 Jan 2018, Dreadful Passions: Fear in the Literary and Medical Imagination, Medieval to Modern, Palgrave Macmillan
Fashionable Diseases: Special issue of Literature and Medicine, Andrews, J., Lawlor, C. 21 Dec 2017
Fashion and Illness in Eighteenth‐Century and Romantic Literature and Culture: Special issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Lawlor, C., O'Connell, A. 1 Dec 2017
Fashioning Illness in the Long Eighteenth Century, O'connell, A., Lawlor, C. 1 Dec 2017, In: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Introduction "An Exclusive Privilege … to Complain": Framing Fashionable Diseases in the Long Eighteenth Century, Andrews, J., Lawlor, C. 31 Dec 2017, In: Literature and Medicine

PGR Supervision

Laurence Sullivan 'Every Woman Her Own Physician’: Literary Portrayals of Lay Women Medical Practitioners on the Page and Stage in Eighteenth-Century Britain Start Date: 07/01/2019 End Date: 12/02/2023
Leanne Cane ‘As To the Education of Youth’: The Novels of Charlotte Smith and the Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Education Debates Start Date: 01/10/2015 End Date: 04/03/2020
Anna Hope Bodily Transformations in the eighteenth century Start Date: 10/01/2011 End Date: 10/11/2014
Mike Dale The social and yprofessional development of massage as socially and professionally accepted practice and treatment in Britain between 1750 and 1950 Start Date: 01/10/2010 End Date: 01/10/2015
Ashleigh Blackwood Managing Maternity: Reproduction and the Literary Imagination in the Eighteenth Century Start Date: 02/10/2012 End Date: 31/01/2018

Qualifications

English PhD June 30 1994

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