Staff profile

I am an interdisciplinary medical humanities researcher working at the intersections of cultural theory, psychology, philosophy and literary studies. I am Director of Durham's Institute for Medical Humanities and from 2012-2022 was Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, a decade-long interdisciplinary study of voice-hearing currently funded by a Wellcome Trust Humanities and Social Sciences Collaborative Award. 

I completed my PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, where I also lectured in Postmodernism and was the lead curriculum designer of Australia's first interdisciplinary coursework degree for doctoral students. I joined Durham University's Centre for Medical Humanities in 2010 and until August 2017 was based in the School of Medicine Pharmacy and Health.

My first book, The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory, was published in 2011, and my current research interests include the interplay between theoretical and subjective accounts of unusual experience and new modes of 'doing interdisciplinarity', especially within the critical medical humanities. I am founding editor of The Polyphony and a Series Editor for Bloomsbury's Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities book series. I have previously served as Associate Editor of the BMJ Medical Humanities Journal, and as academic lead for the world's first major exhibition on voice-hearing, Hearing Voices: Suffering, Inspiration and the Everyday.

I am an experienced supervisor of interdisciplinary doctoral and postdoctoral projects and have co-supervised candidates based in Psychology, Geography, Anthropology, Philosophy, Education and English Studies, as well as in clinical practice. I currently co-supervise two PhD students funded by the Wellcome Trust: Katharine Cheston, who is studying women’s experiences of the shame and stigma of living with complex, poorly-understood medical conditions, and Ariel Swyer, who is examining non-clinical voice-hearing in the context of voice hearers’ lives.

• Critical Medical Humanities
• Voice-Hearing - Phenomenology
• Voice-Hearing - Hermeneutics
• Narrative approaches to mental health
• Interdisciplinary Research & Practice

• 2021: Extension Grant for the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham(£275279.18 from Wellcome Trust)
• 2018: The Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research(£56147.00 from Wellcome Trust)
• 2017: Collaboration in the Critical Medical Humanities(£15000.00 from The British Academy)
• 2017: Development of the Durham Centre for Medical Humanities(£262643.62 from Wellcome Trust)
• 2017: Hearing the Voice 2(£511939.10 from Wellcome Trust)
• 2015: Hearing the Voice 2(£1300958.88 from Wellcome Trust)
• 2014: The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Medical Humanities: An international Workshop (£4664.00 from Wellcome Trust)
• 2012: Hearing the Voice(£332610.00 from Wellcome Trust)
• 2011: IAS Workshop on Voice-Hearing - 24 & 25 November 2011(£4366.00 from Wellcome Trust)

• 2020: Series Editor, Bloomsbury's Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities:
• 2019: Chair, Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Interview Committee, 2019-:
• 2015: Welcome Trust Medical Humanities Early Career Expert Review Group (2015-2019):
• 2015: Wellcome Trust Seed Committee Humanities and Social Sciences (2015-2016):
• 2014: Associate Editor, BMJ Medical Humanities Journal (2014-2019):
• 2013: Visiting Faculty, Rutgers Doctorate of Clinical Social Work (2013-2017):

Authored book

• Woods, A. (2011). The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory. Oxford.: Oxford University Press.

Book review

• Woods, A. (2014). Book Review. Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities. Edited by Victoria Bates, Alan Bleakley, Sam Goodman. Published by Routledge, 2013, hardback, 304 pages. ISBN 978-0415644310, £84.99. Medical Humanities 40(2): 146-148.
• Woods, A. (2013). Book review: Matti Hyvarinen, Lars-Christer Hyden, Maria Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou, Beyond narrative coherence: an introduction. Qualitative research 13(2): 246-248.

Chapter in book

• Whitehead, Anne & Woods, Angela (2016). Introduction. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Whitehead, Anne, Woods, Angela, Atkinson, Sarah, Macnaughton, Jane & Richards, Jennifer Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 1-31.
• Woods, A. (2013). Beyond the Wounded Storyteller: Rethinking Narrativity, Illness and Embodied Self-Experience. In Health, Illness and Disease: Philosophical Essays. Carel, H. & Cooper, R. Newcastle.: Acumen. 113-128.
• Woods, A. (2012). Mathematics <> Masculinity <>Madness. In Madness in Context: Historical, Poetic and Artistic Narratives. Araoz, G. Oxford.: Interdisciplinary Press.

Edited book

• Whitehead, A., Woods, A., Atkinson, S., Macnaughton, J. & Richards, J. (2016). The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh Companions to Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Edited Journal

• Viney, William, Callard, Felicity & Woods, Angela (2015). Critical Medical Humanities. Medical Humanities, 41 (1).

Journal Article

• Cullinan, Rachel J., Woods, Angela, Barber, Joanna M.P. & Cook, Christopher C. H. (2023). Spiritually significant hallucinations: a patient-centred approach to tackle epistemic injustice. BJPsych Bulletin 1.
• Collins, Luke, Brezina, Vaclav, Demjén, Zsófia, Semino, Elena & Woods, Angela (2023). Corpus linguistics and clinical psychology: Investigating personification in first-person accounts of voice-hearing. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 28(1): 28 - 59.
• Moseley, Peter, Powell, Adam, Woods, Angela, Fernyhough, Charles & Alderson-Day, Ben (2022). Voice-hearing across the continuum: a phenomenology of spiritual voices. Schizophrenia Bulletin 48(5): 1066–1074.
• Mayer, Claire, Dodgson, Guy, Woods, Angela & Alderson‐Day, Ben (2022). “Figuring out how to be normal” Exploring how young people and parents make sense of voice‐hearing in the family context. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 95(2): 600-614.
• Woods, Angela, Hart, Akiko & Spandler, Helen (2022). The Recovery Narrative: Politics and Possibilities of a Genre. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 46(2): 221-247.
• Cook, Christopher C.H., Powell, Adam, Alderson-Day, Ben & Woods, Angela (2022). Hearing spiritually significant voices: A phenomenological survey and taxonomy. BMJ Medical Humanities 48(3): 273-284.
• Alderson-Day, Ben, Woods, Angela, Moseley, Peter, Dodgson, Guy, Deamer, Felicity, Common, Stephanie & Fernyhough, Charles (2021). Voice-Hearing and Personification: Characterizing Social Qualities of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Early Psychosis. Schizophrenia Bulletin 47(1): 228-236.
• Collins, Luke C., Semino, Elena, Demjén, Zsófia, Hardie, Andrew, Moseley, Peter, Woods, Angela & Alderson-Day, Ben (2020). A linguistic approach to the psychosis continuum: (dis)similarities and (dis)continuities in how clinical and non-clinical voice-hearers talk about their voices. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 25(6): 447-465.
• Foxwell, John, Alderson-Day, Ben, Fernyhough, Charles & Woods, Angela (2020). ‘I’ve learned I need to treat my characters like people’ Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices. Consciousness and Cognition 79: 102901.
• Woods, Angela (2017). On shame and voice-hearing. Medical Humanities 43(4): 251-256.
• Viney, William, Callard, Felicity & Woods, Angela (2015). Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks. Medical Humanities 41(1): 2-7.
• Woods, A., Jones, N., Alderson-Day, B., Callard, F. & Fernyhough, C. (2015). Experiences of hearing voices: analysis of a novel phenomenological survey. The Lancet Psychiatry 2(4): 323-331.
• Callard, F., Fitzgerald, D. & Woods, A. (2015). Interdisciplinary collaboration in action: tracking the signal, tracing the noise. Palgrave Communications 1: 15019.
• Bernini, M. & Woods, A. (2014). 'Interdisciplinarity as Cognitive Integration: Auditory verbal Hallucinations as a Case study'. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 5(5): 603-612.
• Larøi, F., Luhrmann, T. M., Bell, V., Christian, W. A., Deshpande, S., Fernyhough, C., Jenkins, J. & Woods, A. (2014). Culture and Hallucinations: Overview and Future Directions. Schizophrenia Bulletin 40(Suppl 4): S213-S220.
• Woods, A., Jones, N., Bernini, M., Callard, F., Alderson-Day, B., Badcock, J., Bell,V., Cook, C., Csordas, T., Humpston, C., Krueger, J., Larøi, F., McCarthy-Jones, S., Moseley, P., Powell, H., Raballo, A., Smailes, D. & Fernyhough, C. (2014). Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Phenomenology of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations. Schizophrenia Bulletin 40(Suppl 4): S246-S254.
• Waters, Flavie, Woods, Angela & Fernyhough, Charles (2014). Report on the 2nd International Consortium on Hallucination Research: Evolving Directions and Top-10 “Hot Spots” in Hallucination Research. Schizophrenia Bulletin 40(1): 24-27.
• McCarthy-Jones, S., Thomas, N., Strauss, C., Dodgson, G., Jones, N., Woods, A., Brewin, C., Hayward, M., Stephane, M., Barton, J., Kingdon, D. & Sommer, I. (2014). Better Than Mermaids and Stray Dogs? Subtyping Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and Its Implications for Research and Practice. Schizophrenia Bulletin 40(Suppl 4): S275-S284.
• Woods, A (2013). Rethinking “Patient Testimony” in the Medical Humanities: The Case of Schizophrenia Bulletin’s First Person Accounts. Journal of Literature and Science 6(1): 38-54.
• Woods, Angela (2013). The Voice-Hearer. Journal of Mental Health 22(3): 263.
• Woods, A. (2011). Memoir and the Diagnosis of Schizophrenia: Reflections on The Centre Cannot Hold; Me, Myself, and Them; and the ‘Crumbling Twin Pillars’ of Kraepelinian Psychiatry. Mental Health Review 16(3): 102-106.
• Woods, A. (2011). The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical Humanities. Medical Humanities 37(2): 73-78.
• Woods, A. (2011). Post-Narrative: An Appeal. Narrative Inquiry 21(2): 399-406.
• Woods, A. (2011). 'I suffer in an unknown manner that is hieroglyphical’. Jung and Babette en route to Freud and Schreber. History of the Present 1(2): 244-258.