Contemporary Artists’ Books and Narrative Medicine

Drawing on her research in illness narrative and ongoing interdisciplinary project “Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities”, Dr. Stella Bolaki will explore the potential of the artist’s book to enrich representations of illness and the goals of narrative medicine. The artist’s book is an innovative and versatile medium that extends conventional conceptions of the book as well as a radical format of bringing art to a wider public.

Dr. Bolaki's talk will show how this intimate art form conveys a tangible, multisensory experience of illness and of patients’ worlds. She will illustrate these ideas by looking at contemporary artists’ books from the exhibition Prescriptions that she curated in Canterbury (Beaney Art Museum, 21 April-25 September 2016).

Bio: Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities in the School of English at the University of Kent. She is the author of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and has published articles in Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Mosaic, Textual Practice as well as in several edited volumes. She is also the Director of Kent’s postgraduate programme in Medical Humanities.