Stuart Murray

Profile

Research

I came to Leeds in September 2000 after spending 7 years working at Trinity College, Dublin and my research interests are varied and range across cultures, with a specific focus on 20^th and 21st century topics and texts. I work mainly in medical humanities, cultural disability studies and representation of the posthuman. I was the founding Director of the Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities and have worked widely on multidisciplinary health and disability research with both academic and non-academic partners.

I have written six monographs and edited/co-edited five other books. For the last ten years my work has focused on the relationship between health, disability and technologised embodiment. My monograph Disability and the Posthuman: Bodies, Technologies and Cultural Futures (Liverpool UP, 2020) was the major output of this research and the first book on the topic. It is available open acess here. My work on bodies and technology has led to collaboration with engineers, roboticists, philosophers, designers and disability groups and I was the PI on the 5-year research project, ‘Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures’, funded by a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award in Humanities and Social Sciences that ran from 2020 to 2025. The project was previously funded by a Wellcome Trust Seed Award and an APEX Award for interdisciplinary research from the British Academy, Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering. The major output of the research was a special issue of BMJ: Medical Humanities, published at the end of 2024.

I was also a Joint PI on the Wellcome-funded Research Development Award ‘LivingBodiesObjects: Technology and the Spaces of Health’, which ran from 2020 to 2025. The project explored the ways medical humanities conceives and practices its research, through collaboration with four non-academic partners and a focus on ways of working and experimental research design. Ideas from the project formed part of my most recent book, Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines (Bloomsbury, 2023) which mixes critical and autoethnographic writing in its exploration of the two disciplines,

I have worked closely with the Wellcome Trust and between 2015 and 2020 was Chair of its Medical Humanities Expert Review Group for Investigator and Collaborative Awards.

My latest research project is on sleep and technology. I’m writing a monograph entitled Sleep and Modernism, exploring how modernist literature interacted with developments in sleep technologies between 1900 and 1940. The engaged research connected to this project developed out of LivingBodiesObjects and involves using emerging technologies (particulary VR) to help yound disabled people sleep better. I’m also interested in how the relationship between sleep and technology can produce creative artworks, something I explored in Touching Sleep, an experimental work that used sleep data to make interactive sculptures.

Graduate supervision

I have supervised PhD research across a wide range topics related to health and disability. At the moment these include: theorizing the deployments of chronic pain in memoir and life writing; ideas of disability and the voice in postcolonial literatures and film; surveillance and the body in contemporary literature and film; a comparative study of anglophone and Japanese writing on deafness; and World War One veterans writing on disability and pain. I have supervised over 20 PhDs and also examined 18, both in the UK and internationally.

I welcome interest or enquiries from potential research students thinking of working on any issue connected to medical humanities, especially representations of disability, mental health and sleep, as well posthumanism and fiction.

Recent activity

I give lectures, talks and lead seminars to a variety of academic and non-academic audiences. I have given keynote lectures or presented invited papers in Hong Kong, Taipei, Ottawa, the Einstein Institute in Berlin, New York, Dublin and Stockholm, as well as across the UK. I have also talked at a Special School in Newbury, at the Debating Matters event in London, been invited as a guest critic to an international film festival in Poland, and taken part in a special media panel at the National Autistic Society's international conference. I have been on BBC Radio discussing autism and on Canadian television talking about indigenous cinema. I enjoy the mix of academic conferences and other public engagement events.

I enjoy producing creative work. In 2018, I collaborated with composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad on 'Scenes from Autistic Bedtimes', a song cycle with music by Cheryl Frances-Hoad and a libretto I wrote. The songs were recorded at the Champs Hill recording studion in Sussex and released on Cheryl's CD, Magic Lantern Tales. I made a short film on autism that screened at the Liverpool Tate as part of a show by artist Sarah Browne, and wrote a play in association with Interplay Theatre for the LivingBodiesObjects project. Around twenty-five percent of Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplies is creative writing, including two of my poems.

Research interests

More details of Medical Humanities research in the School of English can be found here.

• Augmenting the Body: Disability, Care and the Posthuman
• Engineering the Imagination: Disability, Prostheses and the Body
• Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures
• The Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research (NNMHR)

Qualifications

• BA (English Literature & American and Commonwealth Arts Studies)
• MA (American Studies)
• DPhil (Postcolonial Literatures)

Student education

At undergraduate level I teach across a full range of 20th and 21st literatures and film, with a particular focus on modernist and contemporary writing. I also supervise final-year projects across a range of modern and contemporary topics.

Research groups and institutes

• Medical Humanities Research Group

Current postgraduate researchers

• Neko Mellor
• Ellie Wakeford