Staff profile
| Affiliation |
|---|
| Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Institute for Medical Humanities |
| Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities |
Biography
Dr Harriet Barratt is a Postdoctoral Research Associate (2025-29) in the Visual & Material Lab at the Wellcome Discovery Research Platform for the Medical Humanities.
Harriet researches the material cultures, patient narratives and psychosocial contexts of medicine, taking an object relations theory approach (her PhD focused on psychoanalytic theorist Donald Winnicott and representations of the material objects of illness). Previous projects and collaborations include a Research England-funded evaluation of the Converge mental health outreach programme, the Wellcome-funded Sensing Spaces of Healthcare Research Collective, and the UKRI-funded ART/DATA/HEALTH project. Between 2013 and 2022 Harriet was a member of the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Trust’s Onward Arts Group, helping to advise on the arts and culture programme across the Trust, and from 2016-17 was resident in the Science Museum’s Medicine team, researching objects across both their holdings and the Wellcome Collection.
Harriet’s new research project, “Donor Conception Materialities: Object Relations in the Clinic, the Home and the Museum”, seeks to transform understandings of complex patient experiences within the UK’s assisted reproductive technology (ART) sector, focusing on the practice of donor conception.
Research interests
- Medical humanities, material culture, medical museums, psychoanalytic object relations theory, narratives of healthcare, co-production