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Professor Clark Lawlor

Professor

Department: Humanities

ADSS Clarklower Facultystaff 255I 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)



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

  • 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

English PhD June 30 1994


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