Author: km345

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In this spotlight, we learn more about LIAS Associate Fellow Dr Sarah Gunn’s work with families impacted by Huntington’s disease (HD), a debilitating and progressive neurodegenerative disorder.

A chance occurrence can change everything. When Dr Sarah Gunn (a clinical psychologist and researcher in the School of Psychology and Vision Science) went to work in a neurorehabilitation unit in 2013, she had no idea that her experiences there would come to define her career. This is where Sarah first worked with people affected by Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative, life-limiting condition which causes deterioration in people’s physical and cognitive abilities, and is linked to often significant changes in emotional wellbeing and behaviour. 

Huntington’s is a genetic condition, inherited from an affected parent, and while physical symptoms emerge around at around 35-45 years, its associated cognitive, emotional and behavioural difficulties can develop as much as 15 years earlier. Among people and families affected by Huntington’s, struggles with psychological wellbeing are painfully common: difficulties with low mood, anxiety, grief, anger and irritability are understandably rife. And yet, these difficulties are under-researched and there is little tailored psychological support available for Huntington’s families.

Sarah has made it her mission to change that. She has been researching the psychology of Huntington’s with a range of skilled collaborators since 2017, with key papers in understanding psychological difficulties in Huntington’s from the research/clinical and person-centred perspectives, and demonstrating difficulties with psychological wellbeing throughout Huntington’s families. Since 2022, she has been collaborating with the Huntington’s Disease Association (HDA, a fantastic charity which provides extensive support to people and families affected by Huntington’s). Sarah has developed programmes of psychological support based on ‘Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’, a flexible and creative therapeutic approach which she has adapted to help people live as well as possible alongside the challenges of Huntington’s. Through her partnership with the HDA, supported by two years of ESRC IAA funding to date, Sarah has delivered regular therapeutic interventions which are freely accessible through the HDA, and which are showing highly positive quantitative and qualitative outcomes. 

In parallel, Sarah is working with her fantastic partners at Lancaster University, Professor Jane Simpson and Dr Fiona Eccles. Together, they are further exploring experiences of mental wellbeing among people affected by Huntington’s, to provide crucial evidence of strengths and areas of need which can help to drive change in healthcare. This work has kindly been funded by the European HD Network through a Lesley Jones Seed Fund grant.

LIAS have been central to Sarah’s community work and creation of impact, generously providing support to enable the launch and continuation of the Leicestershire HD Network – a collaborative effort between Sarah, her University of Leicester colleague Professor Flaviano Giorgini (Genetics and Genome Biology), and Dr Reza Kiani and Dr Maria Dale from our excellent local NHS Huntington’s service. The Network offers research updates, clinical information, and community support to people affected by Huntington’s, and to the researchers and healthcare workers who work with them and support them. So far, people have attended the events from across five counties, and the Network has had remarkable and much-appreciated support from the Huntington’s community, the HDA, the EHDN, high-profile researchers, and skilled clinical workers.

Recently, Sarah and her brilliant team (including her research assistant, doctoral students and clinical psychology trainees) have contributed to the HDA’s Research Appreciation day through videos, with the HDA generously providing a blog and YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM4sSUw-iP8kCp2hxC5tAe02j6C-RrkNY reel specific to Leicester’s Huntington’s research. Sarah and her team are immensely grateful for the HDA’s support, and the support and collaboration they get from the Huntington’s community.

Sarah’s current next steps include publishing her book on psychological care of people affected by Huntington’s, which will come out in early 2026, and continuing to work on driving forward better mental healthcare for people affected by Huntington’s through her clinical and academic work.

Dr Harry Whitehead School of Arts, Media and Communication, Director of the Centre for New Writing & the Literary Leicester Festival.

In this spotlight, LIAS Associate Fellow Dr Harry Whitehead shares insights into his work on the environmental crisis, exploring how creative writing and the arts more broadly can play a vital role in communicating scientific discourse more effectively.

Back in 2016, the novelist Amitav Ghosh described modern fiction’s failure to engage with climate change as a ‘great derangement.’ Things are certainly changing, with many more “climate fiction” novels now in print. But do they constitute no more than, as Kate Rigby puts it (channelling Theodor Adorno), ‘idle chatter’. Or can they be more? In the past few years I’ve become interested in how the arts can help contribute to disseminating the global environmental crisis, the better to increase pro-environmental behaviour. With LIAS ‘Into the City’ funding, I’ve been putting together a project, provisionally titled ‘Creative Climates: Creatively Communicating the Environmental Crisis’, which will link arts organisations and artists with local environmental researchers, producing new art based on that research, and monitoring audience response. This will hopefully lead toward new templates for arts organisations, charities, councils and government to model arts projects to inform and enact change.

Meanwhile, as a creative writer, I’m also engaging with the subject. My new novel, White Road (Claret), published on 8^th September, is an ‘eco-thriller’ telling the story of an offshore oil rig that explodes in the High Arctic just as winter’s setting in, and the environmental catastrophe that follows. It’s also a polar adventure story about the Coast Guard operative, Carrie Essler, lost presumed dead after the accident, who must find her back to civilisation through the beautiful but nightmarish landscape, the oil killing everything just beneath the pristine ice. But who was responsible for the accident – was it corporate negligence or eco-activist terror? I’m travelling the literary festivals on tour right now, fascinated to hear people’s responses.

With LIAS financial ‘follow-on” support, I’ve just spent a month in Ladakh, India, as an artist in residence at an arts organisation in the Himalayas. My next novel will tell the story of a film crew making a tyre advert high in the mountain wilds and the guide who sets about to destroy their plans and them, appalled by the crassness of the project. The wider theme is Himalayan glacial retreat, the increased risk of floods and future water wars. Thanks to LIAS, I was able to visit a key glacier being monitored by satellite as it diminishes at alarming speed.

Also, LIAS’s support also allowed me to offer creative writing workshops to Buddhist writers in the capital Leh, and also to Shia Muslim writers in the smaller town of Kargil on the Pakistan border. This proved a fascinating opportunity to discuss my other research direction: the ways in which my subject, Creative Writing, risks a form of cultural imperialism as its growing popularity takes it ever further around the world: offering versions of storytelling particular to the Anglophone Global North as universal truths. I had many enthralling conversations on this topic with the writers I met.

In this spotlight we learn about PGR representatives Katie Lucas (CSE/Geography) and Lindah Wakhungu’s (CSSAH/Criminology) recent experience of collaborating with LIAS and academics from the University of Leicester and Durham.

Lindah Wakhungu

As a scholar researching Green Crimes in the School of Criminology at the University of Leicester, I recently had the enriching opportunity through LIAS to visit the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University. This visit came as part of a growing collaboration between LIAS and the Durham IAS, aimed at fostering interdisciplinary exchange and engaging underrepresented communities through innovative methods like walking. The one-day interdisciplinary forum was “epic”…a melting pot of ideas that offered unexpected insights into something seemingly simple: walking.

What stood out for me was not just the academic discourse, but the profound ways walking has been reimagined, applied, and researched across different fields. Far beyond a basic mode of transport, walking emerged as a lens through which connection, healing, cognition, and even social equity can be viewed. The forum-introduced categories of walking that resonated deeply: walking to connect, walking to focus, and walking to unwind. These modes highlighted how physical movement can be intentionally designed for mental, emotional, and communal benefits.

Perhaps most impactful was the growing body of research exploring walking as a lifestyle intervention, particularly in public health. I was struck by discussions on walking’s role in diabetes prevention and how it can empower multiethnic populations with long-term health conditions. The notion of “walking away from diabetes” felt not only poetic but also potentially transformative for health equity.

From an economic lens, the forum highlighted the cost-saving benefits for employers who encourage walking among employees, linking physical activity to productivity, reduced sick days, and enhanced well-being. Another aspect was how the brain processes navigation, and how walking sharpens spatial awareness, memory, and mental agility.

Language itself emerged as a cultural gateway into how humans orient themselves. I was particularly reflective and shared how my native language lacked words for “east” or “west”, instead using vertical markers like “uphill” or “downriver” a reminder of how deeply walking and navigation may also be tied to cultural worldviews.

Finally, the correlation between childhood walking habits and ageing—a life-course perspective suggesting that early exposure to walking may hold long-term benefits for cognitive and physical health. The Botanic walk at Durham reminded me that even our steps have stories, and that my study of green harms, paying attention to the human-environment connection is more important than ever. I am looking forward to seeing how this partnership continues to evolve, and how walking can be further explored as a tool for environmental awareness and health at LIAS.

Katie Lucas

Little did I know that my invitation to assist with an IREACCH funding application would turn into an incredible opportunity to broaden my horizons to the possibilities within a simple walk.

LIAS had begun working with the Durham Institute of Advanced Studies to embark on crossing boundaries between research and underrepresented groups through walking. This was spurred by a project run by LIAS a couple of years back – Interdisciplinary Walks. The hope was to bring these diverse groups together to start something new, and I was delighted to be included within this. I hadn’t previously worked with LIAS and was really intrigued by this opportunity. I love walking and as a Geologist I find it very easy to include my subject in those walks and to share this with others. So, to have a chance to learn how other people see walking and how this could be applied in this setting sounded incredible. As part of this I was invited to join LIAS in visiting Durham and participating in a 1-day workshop to really get this project off the ground. This started the day before with an evening meal which was a great chance to meet all the collaborators and learn a bit more about their fields of study, their interests and how they got involved with this project. It was a really incredible experience to meet people with such a broad range of fields and backgrounds. The next day I really got to learn more about these fields and how each person had applied it to walking. From guided walks highlighting the effects of colonialism within the UK to a walk of artefacts and sites within Durham. There were also some incredible and eye-opening talks about the health benefits of walking, standing and even the speed at which someone walked! I found the discussions of walking with memories and understanding and comparing the past to the present to be especially fascinating, especially as one of the talks was about my local area, it really made me pause and think in a way I hadn’t before. The trip to the Durham Botanical Garden on a fresh spring morning was a delightful inclusion and provided more excellent opportunities for getting to meet and chat with the others there.

I am so glad I was invited to assist with the application and that it led me to have this opportunity, following which I am looking forward to the possibility of contributing to the project outcomes and further working with LIAS and encouraging more of the PGR voice in this community.

In this spotlight we hear more about Professor John Goodwin’s research to outline the work and interests of Ilya Neustadt (first professor of Sociology at Leicester). 

Since joining Sociology at Leicester in 1991, I have been fascinated by the development of sociology at the University. From its early days with a single lecturer in the Department of Economics through the 1960s and 1970s, when Leicester served as a key training ground for many who became significant figures in the discipline, there are numerous interesting stories. One largely untold story is the close connections between Leicester Sociology and the Department of Sociology at the University of Ghana in Accra. Both Leicester and Ghana were originally part of the University of London’s accreditation system, which offers context for these close ties. However, these connections extend beyond this; particularly interesting is the time Ilya Neustadt (the first Professor of Sociology at Leicester) and Norbert Elias spent in Ghana. Elias’s time is somewhat detailed in Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation (2022). Nevertheless, Neustadt’s earlier visit to Ghana remains overlooked, and it is this story that forms the basis of my recently awarded LIAS Archives and Special Collections Fellowship.

In 2008, I was fortunate enough to visit the University of Ghana. During my visit, I had access to the archive materials related to Neustadt and Elias. I also had the opportunity to explore the Sociology Department and meet Ghanaian sociologists. It was amazing to walk in their footsteps and see the views they had also seen some fifty years earlier.

My Dear Ilya, I am writing this in the office that you know so well. I like the view from my windows, like almost everything else here. To my mind, this is one of the most beautiful universities in the world, aesthetically speaking….  (Elias to Neustadt, personal correspondence 11th October 1962)

The University of Ghana’s archival materials revealed that while in Ghana, Neustadt conducted original empirical research on the country’s social and economic development and examined African music, literature, and art. This challenges the established narrative of Neustadt being primarily an ‘academic administrator’ rather than a writer or empirical sociological researcher.  This revised perspective on Neustadt was reinforced after consulting the University of Leicester archive document ULA/D57, which contains Neustadt Ghanaian newspaper cuttings, pamphlets, and publications, alongside materials and data related to the Social and Economic Survey of Tema.

Combining these resources with my own archival materials related to Neustadt in Ghana has, somewhat serendipitously, provided an empirical foundation upon which to re-examine the Leicester-Ghana links. Through a sociological lens, my aim is to draw on demography, history, the history of social science, African studies, literary and music studies, archival methods, as well as research practices involving ‘non-standard’ data and ephemera to outline the story of Neustadt’s work and interests in African culture and society. The story will be presented through a workshop, an exhibition, and an article entitled ‘Neustadt’s African Interlude: A Leicester Sociologist in 1950s Ghana’.

The LIAS Archives and Special Collections Fellowship has given me the opportunity to think about and reflect on the archive materials already compiled, as well as to consider the significance of the materials held in document ULA/D57 in Leicester’s Archives and Special Collections. Without the space this Fellowship has provided, I am sure the story of Neustadt in Ghana would remain untold and lost in the archives.

If you’d like to learn more about the Leicester sociology story or Ilya Neustadt, please follow the links to the following web pages and articles.

1. Who Was Ilya Neustadt ? – https://le.ac.uk/cssp/events/neustadt
2. Obituary: Professor Ilya Neustadt –  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor-ilya-neustadt-1473958.html
3. Goodwin, J. and Hughes, J. (2011), Ilya Neustadt, Norbert Elias, and the Leicester Department: personal correspondence and the history of sociology in Britain. The British Journal of Sociology, 62: 677-695. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2011.01386.x
4. Kaspersen, L. B., & Mulvad, A. M. (2017). Towards a Figurational History of Leicester Sociology, 1954–1982. Sociology, 51(6), 1186–1204. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26944622

• LIAS Virtual Seminar Series: Prof. Sergei Petrovskiy, Understanding Phanerozoic mass extinctions: how mathematical modelling can contribute? 24 September 2024 (lead: Dr Kellie Moss).
• Critical Reflection Session: Applying a multidisciplinary approach to defining molecular pathways in lung function impairment, 6 October 2024 (leads: Dr Kellie Moss / Ms Charlotte King).
• Research and Partnership Development, How to get involved in interdisciplinary research, 30 October 2024 (leads: Prof. Clare Anderson / Ms Charlotte King / Dr Kellie Moss).
• LIAS Café, 13 December 2024 (leads: Prof. Clare Anderson / Ms Charlotte King / Dr Kellie Moss).
• LIAS Networking Event for 2024/2025 Award Holders and Fellows, 13 December 2024 (leads: Prof. Clare Anderson / Ms Charlotte King / Dr Kellie Moss).
• LIAS Café, 22 February 2025 (leads: Prof. Clare Anderson / Ms Charlotte King / Dr Kellie Moss).
• Culture Talks: Artist Sabrina Tirvengadum and Professor Clare Anderson discuss ‘Who were they? Who am I?’, 11 March 2025 (lead: Prof. Clare Anderson).
• Durham Walking Research Network Workshop, 17/18 March 2025 (leads: Prof. Clare Anderson, Prof. Alex Easton, Director of Durham IAS).
• Literary Leicester, ‘10 days that changed the world’, 21 March 2025 (leads: Prof. Clare Anderson, Dr Kellie Moss, Ms Charlotte King).
• LIAS Virtual Seminar Series: Dr Sarah Gunn ‘Building connections and support for people affected by Huntington’s disease’, 28 May 2025 (lead: Dr Kellie Moss).
• LIAS / PGR workshop: Prof Christina Hughes ‘Taking the next steps in your research: planning for success’, 9 July 2025 (leads: Prof. Clare Anderson / Ms Charlotte King / Dr Kellie Moss).
• LIAS Award Holders Showcase Lunch, 31 July 2025 (lead: Ms Charlotte King).

This Anthology celebrates some of the diverse interdisciplinary research projects awarded by The Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies. It invites readers to learn more about the projects taking place at the University, and to better understand the breadth of opportunity made possible through interdisciplinary research.

Artist: Amy McKay

Cr/ía is an outward-facing and interdisciplinary hub for arts-centred research across and beyond the College of Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities. With a shared commitment to foregrounding the value of the arts – socially, and as a form of knowledge – our work has two inter-linked strands:

Creative Research: Art as knowledge, language and method

This strand centres on how arts-based methods can be used to access forms of knowledge that exceed the written or spoken word and generate – with communities and across disciplinary boundaries – new ways and forms of understanding. Lead: Dr Alice Tilche

Arts-based research methods are increasingly used across disciplines and become especially pertinent as institutions work to decolonize their approaches to knowledge. Research has been dominated by the ‘articulable’ – that which can be said, heard, written and read in the realm of words, but there are languages that involve alternative epistemologies and processes of knowing: those of physicality, of the labouring body, image, sound and rhythm. By centering the body, image and sound, arts-based research methods enable experiences to be released from the primacy of text and speech. Arts-based research, furthermore, has the potential to impact concerns typically linked to social sciences fields, thereby also strengthening an argument for the value of art in research.

Instituting Art: Arts at the conjunction of practice, place, public and policy

This strand centres on / collaborates with the diverse institutional formations that allow art to exist within public realms, and thus shape / be shaped by wider social and cultural dynamics and attitudes. Lead: Dr Isobel Whitelegg

Art does not come to exist socially and gain wider relevance and meaning without the varied institutional forms that enable artforms to be learned, produced, and placed into a public realm. Both historically, and in the present day, attitudes towards art – and the value we place on its existence – are contingent on structures of power and influence that enable a diverse art-institutional ecology to thrive, diverse communities to find expression, and new cultural attitudes to be forged (or contested). By placing arts-centred public institutions at the centre of our research, we foreground who art is for and what it contributes to social life, while enhancing the visibility and value of art-institutional forms that exceed the museum and art gallery model.

Co-Leads: Dr Alice Tilche and Dr Isobel Whitelegg

Core members: Dr Stacy Boldrick, Prof. Corinne Fowler, Dr Rosemary Shirley

Upcoming Workshops

Embodying consent: With yourself, with others and during research.  

Friday 14th February 2025. 11-2 pm (with break) *** pls wear comfortable clothing. Attenborough Arts Centre, Main Hall.  Zoe Goodman, Anthropologist and Facilitator at Rebellious Care. Alice Tilche, Associate Prof in Anthropology and Museum Studies, University of Leicester 

Creative Writing & Research  

Wednesday 19th March, 2-4 pm. Attenborough Arts Centre, Studio 1. Corinne Fowler, Professor of Colonialism and Heritage, University of Leicester 

Place-based methods. 

Tuesday 29th April, 2-4 pm. Attenborough Arts Centre, Studio 3. Rosemary Shirley, Associate Prof in Museum Studies, University of Leicester 

‘Your silence will not protect you’: Arts-based techniques to surface challenging power dynamics and normalize conflict  

Thursday 22 May. 11-2pm *** pls wear comfortable clothing. Attenborough Arts Centre, Main Hall. Zoe Goodman, Anthropologist and Facilitator at Rebellious Care 

To book a space please email: lias@leicester.ac.uk

The aim of these guidelines is to provide practical guidance and outline clear expectations to facilitate inclusive events involving the Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS). Research, educational, and professional conferences, workshops, and other types of meeting or event provide valuable opportunities for interdisciplinary research. We would therefore ask organisers to view their event as an opportunity to exemplify the university’s commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), and to the values and behaviours that we want to shape our working environment. To aid implementation of our policy we have produced the following guidance.  

In this spotlight we hear more about LIAS Associate Fellow Dr Diane Levine and Fellow Alumni Professor Linda Theron’s research on trying to understand what helps Africa(n) children and young people cope well when life is hard, including their journey to success with a newly awarded Wellcome Trust Discovery grant.

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Sometimes you get to meet researchers doing inspiring work, and sometimes they turn out to be exactly as you hoped they would be. In 2018, when Dr Di Levine (School of Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy) sent an email to Professor Linda Theron (University of Pretoria) whose work on Africa(n)-aligned resilience Di had followed for some years, she wasn’t expecting a response. Imagine her delight, then, when Linda replied positively, and a dialogue began. Linda was thrilled to learn about digital methods from Di and their potential to shed new light on and champion Africa(n)-aligned resilience.

The collaboration began with a successful application to the British Academy/Newton Fund Mobility scheme (£10K). Key to the success of that application was an endorsement from the then newly-formed Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies because of the interdisciplinary nature of the collaboration. It wasn’t grand interdisciplinarity linking distant disciplinary relatives – just two relatively close cousin disciplines working together towards a mutual goal, and more importantly establishing that there were shared values on which to build.

Small pots of money followed, facilitated through internal and external research funding. First, through successful application to the University’s Research England GCRF allocation, focused on exploring links between the air quality and youth resilience in South Africa (£20K), and the extension of the collaboration into physics and epidemiology at Leicester, and to the SAMRC.

Then, just before COVID-19 hit, we were awarded £50,000 from the British Academy’s Humanities and the Social Sciences Tackling Global Challenges scheme. The purpose of this project was to explore the mental health risks faced by emerging adults in African townships. Prior resilience studies had left gaps in understanding the factors influencing resilience. We were privileged to work with 60 young adults from a South African township in producing new insights into the topic, and will be eternally grateful to the British Academy for honourably sticking to the financial commitment, even when the ODA research budget was decimated. We recently held our closing workshop for this project with sixty practitioners, young people, policy, police and civil society organisations, and look forward to the two further journal articles currently under review being published. Keep an eye out for our forthcoming graphic novel based on our findings.

We are now taking a new step in our collaboration journey. Following two co-productive workshops with young people in South Africa and Nigeria about their resilience pathways and depression, a LIAS Fellowship, Linda was successful in leading a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award application (£5M).

Here, we aim to uncover the specific blend of risks and resources predicting depression trajectories among African youth. With Africa poised to have the largest youth population, understanding is urgent, especially as 1 in 5 African youth are ‘not in education, employment, or training’ (NEET), heightening vulnerability to depression. Following 18-24-year-old NEET youth in Nigeria and South Africa (N=1600) for 24 months will reveal the predictors of depression. Further exploration with a subset will offer insights into resilience mechanisms, guiding tailored interventions crucial for African youth’s mental health.

1. Selected outputs: Digital stories; Digital Storytelling in Low Resource Settings: a guide for teachers, psychologists and youth workers; African Emerging Adult Resilience: insights from a sample of township youth; Digital Storytelling with South African Youth: a critical reflection.
2. Highveld Air Pollution Priority Area in South Africa.
3. Sources of mental health: a video by Tsietsi Morobi (5.57 minutes); Sources of mental health: a video by Tsietsi Morobi (2.48 minutes); Sources of mental health: a video by Tsietsi Morobi (12.28 minutes); The inhibitors and enablers of emerging adult COVID-19 mitigation compliance in a township context; Resilience to depression among emerging adults in South Africa: insights from digital diaries (under review); NEET and resilience: The lived experiences of a sample of South African emerging adults (under review).

In this spotlight we hear from fellow Ipshita Nath, Post-Doctoral Fellow at Department of History (History of Medicine), University of Saskatchewan, Canada to find out how impactful her time at the University was and how they have progressed since. 

“My experience as a LIAS Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester allowed me to liaise with scholars in the fields of history, law, and clinical sciences, as well as medical practitioners (respiratory diseases) in the UK. 

“This helped me plan my next research project tentatively titled, Diseased Behind Bars: Histories of Tuberculosis in Indian Prisons, Past and Present, spanning the nineteenth century to the post-COVID-19 pandemic era. This study will consider prisons as distinct medical sites for TB investigation, focusing on specialized research regarding their unique limitations and failures. This is critical given that the recent improvements in India’s TB control metrics are not reflected in prisons. 

“The Lancet Public Health, in July 2023, has brought to light that prisoners in India are five times more at risk of TB as compared to the civilian population, this project would be timely and pertinent. The situation in Indian prisons is all the more glaring because while the performance in various metrics of TB control improved overall in the country (according to the TB Report of 2022), the same is not observed in prisons. 

“Furthermore, TB in Indian prisons has only been given cursory attention by medical historians, which would make my study the first dedicated monograph on TB control and management measures in Indian prisons, aimed at revealing historical continuities in limitations, by mapping them alongside developments in penal reforms and public health. It will particularly highlight how TB measures translate differently in case of incarcerated populations that are an under-served section of society, in comparison to the free population, thereby revealing links between prison spaces and TB infection. 

“This makes it necessary to examine prisons as a unique medical site of investigation requiring specialized research. For this study, I will create an interdisciplinary methodological approach in medical humanities by incorporating ethnographic tools to address the limitations in archival materials, thus marking an advance over the existing scholarship on TB in India.  

“Furthermore, the fellowship provided me tremendous exposure and the resources to initiate and participate in a number of activities. I organized a conference: Personal Writing and Textual Practices in the British Empire, C19th-20^th, One-day conference, University of Leicester, Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS), Friday 14 April 2023. 

“I gave a talk, ‘Land of Pestilence’: Death, Disease, and ‘Doctorly’ Memsahibs in Colonial India: Centre for Victorian Studies, Spring Seminar Series: CVS, University of Leicester, UK. 29h March, 2023. I also chaired a panel for the University of Leicester, School of History, politics, and international relations (HyPIR) conference on health and diseases. Furthermore, I initiated a round-table discussion on Tuberculosis in prisons with a multidisciplinary cohort.”