Professor Martin Halliwell

Department: English and Centre for American Studies

Telephone: +44 (0)116 252 2645

Email: mrh17@le.ac.uk

Office: Room 1302, Attenborough Tower

Address: School of Arts, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH

Personal details

Biography

I am a specialist in American cultural, intellectual and literary history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and in the health humanities. I am Professor of American Studies in the Centre for American Studies and am currently the Head of the School of Arts. I served as Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor International (2013-16), the Director of International Strategy for the College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities (2013-18), a Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership Site Director (2013-18), Head of the School of English (2008-13), and Director of American Studies (2005-8). I am the Co-Lead for Humanities and Social Sciences for the University’s Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund and a member of the Action on Communities on Health and Equality group.

Beyond Leicester, I am the President of the English Association, following four years as the Association’s Chair of Trustees. I was Chair of the British Association for American Studies (2010-13), after serving as Vice-Chair of BAAS and Chair of Publications. I am currently an Ambassador for Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers for the European Association for American Studies, after serving as the UK Ambassador for EAAS for five years.

I chaired the QAA Subject Benchmark Review Group in 2014-15 that produced the latest English Benchmark statement. I was a panel member of the English Language and Literature Subpanel for the Research Excellence Framework REF2014, and am a subpanel member in REF2021 for the criteria-setting and assessment stages, as well as being the named REF2021 interdisciplinary lead for Unit of Assessment 29.

I was an Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Reviewer 2006-15 and a Strategic Reviewer 2011-15, and I sat on the AHRC’s postgraduate funding panel 2006-9. I currently sit on the AHRC’s Science in Culture Advisory Group and am a member of the cross-research council Mental Health Experts Group. In November 2016 I became Co-Chair the Arts and Humanities Alliance. In this role I sit on the British Academy’s Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Skills Advisory Group and the Strategic Forum for the Humanities.

Qualifications

Publications

Books

• American Health Crisis: Panic, Planning, and Politics, 1918–2018 (in preparation)
• Voices of Mental Health: Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970–2000 (Rutgers University Press, 2017)
• Neil Young: American Traveller (Reaktion and University of Chicago Press, 2015)
• Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945–1970 (Rutgers University Press, hbk 2013, pbk 2014)
• Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011) [co-authored with Paul Hegarty]
• American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh University, 2007)
• The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture (American Intellectual Culture series, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
• Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, February 2004; reissued by Routledge in 2016).
• Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh University Press, 2003) [co-authored with Andrew Mousley]
• Modernism and Morality: Ethical Devices in Transatlantic Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2001). Republished in an updated paperback edition as Transatlantic Modernism: Moral Dilemmas in Modernist Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2006).
• Romantic Science and the Experience of Self: Transatlantic Crosscurrents from William James to Oliver Sacks (London: Ashgate, 1999; reissued by Routledge in hbk in 2016 and pbk in 2017).

Edited volumes

Research

My research interests span American cultural and intellectual history, the health humanities and disability studies, twentieth-century and contemporary American fiction, American film after 1945, the history of popular music, critical theory, psychoanalysis and the history of psychology, urban cultures, the avant-garde, and cultures of protest.

In October 2017 I published my tenth monograph, Voices of Mental Health: Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970-2000 and in February 2018 the co-edited volume Reframing 1968: American Politics, Protest and Identity to mark 50 years since the most turbulent year in modern American history.

I am currently working on three projects:

• an archival monograph project on American Health Crises
• a co-edited companion on The Politics of American Health
• a project on Biotechnology, Medicine and Contemporary Culture that will form the basis for the third book in a trilogy with Rutgers University Press, following Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017).

I was Visiting Fellow in North American Studies at the Eccles Centre at the British Library in 2016-17 and Maynard Keynes Visiting Professor in United States Studies at University College London’s Institute of the Americas 2013-16. In 2007 I was Senior Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.

I am an experienced academic Series Editor and have edited four academic series with Edinburgh University Press:

• a new quality monograph series Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century, co-edited with Mark Whalan (Oregon)
• the BAAS Paperbacks Series with Emily West (Reading)
• the nine-volume Twentieth-Century American Culture (2007-10)
• the eighteen-volume Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature (2008-16)

Teaching

I teach across the range of American literature from the Revolutionary period to contemporary America, with a special interest in early twentieth-century literature, post-World War II American fiction, film and visual culture, critical theory and popular music.

I currently contribute to:

• AM1002: Classic US Texts
• AM1005: Modern American Literature
• AM1006: The American West
• AM2011: The American City (convener 2017-18)
• AM2013: Ethnicity and Diversity in American Literature, 1950-2000

I have taught the following specialist modules:

• EN3005: Containment and Resistance in 1950s & 1960s American Culture
• AM3042: American Culture after 9/11
• AM7132: Literature in Exile Americans in Paris

Supervision