Professor Martin Halliwell
Personal details | Publications | Research | Teaching | Supervision
Head of the School of Arts and Professor of American Studies
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
- BA English, University of Exeter
- MA Critical Theory, University of Exeter
- PhD American Studies, University of Nottingham
- Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy
- ILM Award Level 7 in Strategic Leadership
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
- The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health (Edinburgh University Press, in preparation) [co-edited with Sophie Jones]
- Reframing 1968: American Politics, Protest and Identity (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) [co-edited with Nick Witham]
- William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism and the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) [co-edited with Joel Rasmussen]
- American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century (Edinburgh UP and Columbia UP, October 2008) [co-edited with Catherine Morley]
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
I have supervised 13 PhDs and 1 MPhil to completion and currently supervise 6 PhD students, three of whom have AHRC funding. I have externally examined 24 PhDs.
I am keen to supervise projects at PhD and MA level that fall within the following areas:
- Twentieth-Century American Fiction
- The History of Medicine and Psychology
- Mental Health (History, Culture, Politics)
- Disability and Modern/Contemporary Culture
- American Film 1945-2000
- 1950s and 1960s American Culture
- American and European Modernism
- American Intellectual History
- Transatlantic Literature and Culture
- The Avant-Garde
- American Visual Culture
- American Ethnicity and Race
- Cultures of Protest