'Tuberculosis as a Romantic Disease: Artistic, Historical and Literary Perspectives'

A workshop funded by the Leverhulme Trust

Location: Old Library Building, Research Beehive, Room 2.21 
Time/Date: 18th June 2015, 16:00 - 18:30 

Speakers:Dr Helen Bynum (Historian), 'Tuberculous Lives - Conforming to the Stereotype?’

Anna Dumitriu (Artist) ‘The Romantic Disease: An Artistic Investigation of Tuberculosis’

Dr Helen Bynum, studied human sciences and medical history at UCL and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, before lecturing in medical history at the University of Liverpool. She is the author (as Helen Power) of Tropical Medicine in the 20th Century, (Kegan Paul, 1999) and co-editor of the ‘Biographies of Disease’ series. In this series, she is author of Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis (OUP, 2012). 

Anna Dumitriu’s work is at the forefront of art and science collaborative practice, with a strong interest in the ethical issues raised by emerging technologies and a focus on microbiology and healthcare. Her installations and performances use a range of biological, digital, and traditional media. She has exhibited in Barcelona, Dublin, Taipei, and London. She is Artist in Residence on the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at The University of Oxford, and holds Visiting Research Fellowships with the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, and with the Wellcome Trust Brighton and Sussex Centre for Global Health Research. Her exhibition ‘The Romantic Disease: An Artistic Investigation of Tuberculosis’ premiered in London (2014) and has since toured to Amsterdam and Berlin. It entails an artistic investigation into Tuberculosis from early superstitions about the disease to the latest research into genome sequencing of bacteria.

This workshop is organised by the ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832’ project team, a Leverhulme funded collaboration between colleagues in History of Medicine at Newcastle University and English Literature at Northumbria University.