Felicity Callard

Dr Felicity Callard is the Director of Hubbub (The Hub at Wellcome Collection). At Durham University she is Reader in Social Science for Medical Humanities; her departmental home is geography. She has a background in both the humanities and the social sciences: she took a first class degree in geography at the University of Oxford, before moving to the University of Sussex to take a masters degree in English (Critical Theory). Her doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University, in cultural / medical geography (directed by Professors David Harvey and Ruth Leys), entailed working at the intersection of the humanities, history of psychiatry, cultural studies and social theory. Specifically, she explored the genealogy of agoraphobia and phobias from their emergence as named conditions in the 1870s to the emergence of Panic Disorder in DSM-III, IIIR and IV. She is in the process of extending this research into a monograph -- by focusing in particular on the early clinical pharmacological research in the US (pursued by Max Fink and Donald Klein at The Hillside Hospital) and on behavioral therapeutic interventions for anxiety and phobias.

She has broad research interests in the history and living present of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and cognitive neuroscience. One strand of her research comprises an interrogation of new models of self and the experimental subject within the cognitive neurosciences and biological psychiatry. She collaborates with Dr Daniel Margulies (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive & Brain Sciences, Leipzig) on a critical exploration of the field of resting state functional neuroimaging research, and with Dr Constantina Papoulias on a historical and conceptual study of the nascent interdisciplinary domain of neuro-psychoanalysis. She and Constantina also have an ongoing project to understand the "affective turn" within the social sciences and the humanities, and its use and deployment of neuroscientific findings.

She has also worked independently as a researcher and consultant in mental health, and continues to participate in mental health policy at a European level. She has an honorary affiliation to the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London (where she is Visiting Researcher in the Patient and Carer Participation Theme of the Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health).