About the Speaker

Professor Neil Vickers, Co-Director of the Centre for the Humanities and Health at Department of English, King's College London

My current research lies exclusively in the health humanities. My latest book (co-authored with Derek Bolton), Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment, will be published in the summer of 2024 by Reaktion Books. It is about what major illness does to social belonging in the WEIRD world (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic). Drawing on social neuroscience, group psychology, psychoanalysis, infant research, disability theory and microsociology, we offer a psychobiological account of relations between the healthy and the ill in contemporary Western societies that highlights the creative power of care and the devastation of abandonment.

I am currently co-editing (with Patrick ffrench and Céline Lefève) a special number of the History of the Human Sciences on the history of the medical humanities, which is also the subject of a book I am writing.

I have a strong interest in the history of the Psy disciplines – but most especially the British psychoanalytic tradition – and their relation to concepts of health and illness more generally.