Dr Michael Flexer

I am a lecturer in English, director of Liberal Arts and co-director for engagement at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, where I was previously the publicly engaged research fellow in the Wellcome-funded Waiting Times project led by Professor Laura Salisbury (Exeter) and Professor Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck).

You can visit the project website here to see some of the stories co-created with various publics, or hear me talk about the project on BBC Radio 3 here and on BBC News here.

My research and teaching interests include: semiotics; mental health and particularly 'psychosis'; time; the medical encounter and diagnosis; Marxist and (post)structuralist critical theories. I convene both the first year core module on the Liberal Arts programme - Being Human in the Modern World - and my third-year optional module for English and Film BA students: 'Mad!'

I've published on politics in the time of Covid-19, Kurt Vonnegut, Marge Piercy, Charles Peirce's semiotics, the medical case report as a literary genre and the varying formulations of the contested diagnosis of 'schizophrenia'.

My monograph on the semiotics of schizophrenia - The Madness of Meaning - is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press.

Biography:

I studied for BA at St. Hugh's College, Oxford and then completed an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice at Central School of Speech and Drama.

After working for nearly 10 years as a dramatist with my own small theatre company, and as a practicising semiotician, I returned to academia in 2010. I studied for my MSc in Medical Humanities at King's College, London and was awarded the inaugural medical humanities PhD studentship at the University of Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities in 2012.

My PhD was an interdisciplinary piece of research into representations (cultural, medical and testimonial) of psychosis. I was cross-supervised by Professor Stuart Murray in the School of English and Professor Allan House in the Institute of Health Sciences.

In 2016, I completed a post-doc at King's College, London with Professor Brian Hurwitz. I worked in the English department at Sheffield Hallam from 2016-2017, convening the psycholinguistics module, and immediately prior to my appointment at Exeter, I worked as a Teaching Fellow at Imperial College, London, designing their new BSc in Medical Sciences with Humanities, Philosophy and Law.

Research supervision:

I am very keen to supervise interdisciplinary PhDs, particularly those with either (or both) a medical humanities and public engagement element. If you are thinking of doing some engaged, critical medical humanities work, do contact me by email to discuss your proposal, as I am co-director for engagement at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Enviroments of Health and may be able to support you in finding a supervisory team.

I am looking to supervise PhDs on:

• medical humanities
• mental health and 'psychosis'
• diagnostic categories and contested diseases
• epistemic (in)justice and health
• medical case reports as literary genre
• illness writing, end-of-life narratives and pathography
• semiotics (Saussurean and Peircean)
• structuralism and post-structuralist thought, especially Deleuze and Guattari

In the first instance, email me with a brief (less than 500 word) outline of your proposed research topic and a copy of your CV.