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
Introduction, Lawlor, C., Williams, H. 25 Jun 2024, Myth and (mis)information, Manchester, Manchester University Press
Myth and (Mis)information: Constructing the Medical Professions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Culture , Ingram, A., Lawlor, C., Williams, H. 25 Jun 2024
'The very women read it': Medical selffashioning, mythologies and (mis)information in George Cheyne MD's medical writings, Lawlor, C. 25 Jun 2024, Myth and (mis)information, Manchester, Manchester University Press
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

Current and Recent Projects

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
WRITING DOCTORS:SELF-REPRESENTATION AND REPUTATION AMONG MEDICAL MEN AND WOMEN IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, Lawlor, C. (Principal Investigator), The Leverhulme Trust, 30/09/18 - 29/09/21, £295,430.00