Staff profile

I am a medical humanities researcher with research interests and expertise spanning three linked areas: the interplay between clinical, experiential and cultural-theoretical accounts of voice-hearing and psychosis; narrative and its role in understanding health; and the dynamics of interdisciplinary and collaborative research. 

I am the Director of Durham's Institute for Medical Humanities and the Director of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, funded by a £9.5m Wellcome Trust award (2023-2030). From 2012-2022 I was Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, a decade-long interdisciplinary study of voice-hearing also funded by the Wellcome Trust. 

I completed my PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, where I also lectured in Postmodernism and was the lead curriculum designer of Australia's first interdisciplinary coursework degree for doctoral students. I joined Durham University's Centre for Medical Humanities in 2010 and until August 2016 was based in the School of Medicine Pharmacy and Health.

I am founding editor of The Polyphony and a Series Editor for Bloomsbury's Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities book series. I have previously served as Associate Editor of the BMJ Medical Humanities Journal, and as academic lead for the world's first major exhibition on voice-hearing, Hearing Voices: Suffering, Inspiration and the Everyday.

I am an experienced supervisor of interdisciplinary doctoral and postdoctoral projects and have co-supervised researchers based in Psychology, Geography, Anthropology, Philosophy, Education and English Studies, as well as in clinical practice. I currently co-supervise three PhD students: Katharine Cheston, who is studying women’s experiences of the shame and stigma of living with complex, poorly-understood medical conditions; Ariel Swyer, who is examining non-clinical voice-hearing in the context of voice hearers’ lives; and Georgia Poplett, whose thesis combines creative and critical approaches to writing the lived experience of postpartum psychosis.

Unfortunately I will not be in a position in 2023-24 to support new PhD or Postdoctoral Fellowship applications. 

• Critical Medical Humanities
• Voice-Hearing - Phenomenology
• Voice-Hearing - Hermeneutics
• Narrative approaches to mental health
• Interdisciplinary Research & Practice

• 2020: Series Editor, Bloomsbury's Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities:
• 2019: Chair, Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Interview Committee:
• 2015: Welcome Trust Medical Humanities Early Career Expert Review Group:
• 2015: Wellcome Trust Seed Committee Humanities and Social Sciences:
• 2014: Associate Editor, BMJ Medical Humanities Journal:
• 2013: Visiting Faculty, Rutgers Doctorate of Clinical Social Work:

Authored book

• Woods, A. (2011). The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory. Oxford University Press

Book review

• Woods, A. (2014). Book Review. Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities. Edited by Victoria Bates, Alan Bleakley, Sam Goodman. Published by Routledge, 2013, hardback, 304 pages. ISBN 978-0415644310, £84.99. Medical Humanities, 40(2), 146-148. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2014-010500
• Woods, A. (2013). Book review: Matti Hyvarinen, Lars-Christer Hyden, Maria Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou, Beyond narrative coherence: an introduction. Qualitative Research, 13(2), 246-248. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794112442920

Chapter in book

• Woods, A., & Rákóczi, J. (2024). Literature in Collaboration: The Work of Literature in the Critical Medical Humanities. In A. M. Elsner, & M. Pietrzak-Franger (Eds.), Literature and Medicine (357-374). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009300070.025
• Whitehead, A., & Woods, A. (2016). Introduction. In A. Whitehead, A. Woods, S. Atkinson, J. Macnaughton, & J. Richards (Eds.), The Edinburgh companion to the critical medical humanities (1-31). Edinburgh University Press
• Woods, A. (2012). Beyond the Wounded Storyteller: Rethinking Narrativity, Illness and Embodied Self-Experience. In H. Carel, & R. Cooper (Eds.), Health, illness and disease: philosophical essays (113-128). Acumen Publishing
• Woods, A. (2012). Mathematics Masculinity Madness. In G. Araoz (Ed.), Madness in context : historical, poetic and artistic narratives. Interdisciplinary Press

Edited book

• Whitehead, A., Woods, A., Atkinson, S., Macnaughton, J., & Richards, J. (Eds.). (2016). The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh University Press

Journal Article

• Swyer, A., Woods, A., Ellison, A., & Alderson-Day, B. (online). “Distress is probably the wrong word”: exploring uncertainty and ambivalence in non-clinical voice-hearing and the psychosis continuum. Psychosis: Psychological, Social and Integrative Approaches, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/17522439.2024.2407138
• Cullinan, R. J., Woods, A., Barber, J. M., & Cook, C. C. (online). Spiritually significant hallucinations: a patient-centred approach to tackle epistemic injustice. BJPsych Bulletin, 48(2), 133-138. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjb.2023.17
• McGuire, C., & Woods, A. (2024). History at the heart of medicine. Wellcome Open Research, 9(249), https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.21229.1
• Collins, L., Brezina, V., Demjén, Z., Semino, E., & Woods, A. (2023). Corpus linguistics and clinical psychology: Investigating personification in first-person accounts of voice-hearing. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 28(1), 28-59. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.21019.col
• Cheston, K., Cenedese, M.-L., & Woods, A. (2023). The Long or the Post of It? Temporality, Suffering, and Uncertainty in Narratives Following COVID-19. Journal of Medical Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09824-y
• Moseley, P., Powell, A., Woods, A., Fernyhough, C., & Alderson-Day, B. (2022). Voice-hearing across the continuum: a phenomenology of spiritual voices. Schizophrenia Bulletin: The Journal of Psychoses and Related Disorders, 48(5), 1066-1074. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbac054
• Cook, C. C., Powell, A., Alderson-Day, B., & Woods, A. (2022). Hearing spiritually significant voices: A phenomenological survey and taxonomy. Medical Humanities, 48(3), 273-284. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-012021
• Woods, A., Hart, A., & Spandler, H. (2022). The Recovery Narrative: Politics and Possibilities of a Genre. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 46(2), 221-247. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-019-09623-y
• Mayer, C., Dodgson, G., Woods, A., & Alderson‐Day, B. (2022). “Figuring out how to be normal”: Exploring how young people and parents make sense of voice‐hearing in the family context. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 95(2), 600-614. https://doi.org/10.1111/papt.12381
• Alderson-Day, B., Woods, A., Moseley, P., Dodgson, G., Deamer, F., Common, S., & Fernyhough, C. (2021). Voice-Hearing and Personification: Characterizing Social Qualities of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Early Psychosis. Schizophrenia Bulletin: The Journal of Psychoses and Related Disorders, 47(1), 228-236. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbaa095
• Foxwell, J., Alderson-Day, B., Fernyhough, C., & Woods, A. (2020). ‘I’ve learned I need to treat my characters like people’: Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices. Consciousness and Cognition, 79, Article 102901. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102901
• Collins, L. C., Semino, E., Demjén, Z., Hardie, A., Moseley, P., Woods, A., & Alderson-Day, B. (2020). A linguistic approach to the psychosis continuum: (dis)similarities and (dis)continuities in how clinical and non-clinical voice-hearers talk about their voices. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 25(6), 447-465. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546805.2020.1842727
• Woods, A. (2017). On shame and voice-hearing. Medical Humanities, 43(4), 251-256. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2016-011167
• Callard, F., Fitzgerald, D., & Woods, A. (2015). Interdisciplinary collaboration in action: tracking the signal, tracing the noise. Palgrave communications, 1, https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2015.19
• Viney, W., Callard, F., & Woods, A. (2015). Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks. Medical Humanities, 41(1), 2-7. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2015-010692
• Woods, A., Jones, N., Alderson-Day, B., Callard, F., & Fernyhough, C. (2015). Experiences of hearing voices: analysis of a novel phenomenological survey. The Lancet Psychiatry, 2(4), 323-331. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2215-0366%2815%2900006-1
• Bernini, M., & Woods, A. (2014). Interdisciplinarity as Cognitive Integration: Auditory verbal Hallucinations as a Case study. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 5(5), 603-612. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1305
• Larøi, F., Luhrmann, T., Bell, V., Christian, W., Deshpande, S., Fernyhough, C., Jenkins, J., & Woods, A. (2014). Culture and Hallucinations: Overview and Future Directions. Schizophrenia Bulletin: The Journal of Psychoses and Related Disorders, 40(Suppl 4), S213-S220. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbu012
• McCarthy-Jones, S., Thomas, N., Strauss, C., Dodgson, G., Jones, N., Woods, A., Brewin, C., Hayward, M., Stephane, M., Barton, J., Kingdon, D., & Sommer, I. (2014). Better Than Mermaids and Stray Dogs? Subtyping Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and Its Implications for Research and Practice. Schizophrenia Bulletin: The Journal of Psychoses and Related Disorders, 40(Suppl 4), S275-S284. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbu018
• Woods, A., Jones, N., Bernini, M., Callard, F., Alderson-Day, B., Badcock, J., Bell, V., Cook, C., Csordas, T., Humpston, C., Krueger, J., Larøi, F., McCarthy-Jones, S., Moseley, P., Powell, H., Raballo, A., Smailes, D., & Fernyhough, C. (2014). Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Phenomenology of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations. Schizophrenia Bulletin: The Journal of Psychoses and Related Disorders, 40(Suppl 4), S246-S254. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbu003
• Waters, F., Woods, A., & Fernyhough, C. (2014). Report on the 2nd International Consortium on Hallucination Research: Evolving Directions and Top-10 “Hot Spots” in Hallucination Research. Schizophrenia Bulletin: The Journal of Psychoses and Related Disorders, 40(1), 24-27. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbt167
• Woods, A. (2013). Rethinking “Patient Testimony” in the Medical Humanities: The Case of Schizophrenia Bulletin’s First Person Accounts. Journal of literature and science, 6(1), 38-54. https://doi.org/10.12929/jls.06.1.03
• Woods, A. (2013). The Voice-Hearer. Journal of Mental Health, 22(3), https://doi.org/10.3109/09638237.2013.799267
• Woods, A. (2011). The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical Humanities. Medical Humanities, 37(2), 73-78. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2011-010045
• Woods, A. (2011). 'I suffer in an unknown manner that is hieroglyphical’. Jung and Babette en route to Freud and Schreber. History of the Present, 1(2), 244-258. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.1.2.0244
• Woods, A. (2011). Memoir and the Diagnosis of Schizophrenia: Reflections on The Centre Cannot Hold; Me, Myself, and Them; and the ‘Crumbling Twin Pillars’ of Kraepelinian Psychiatry. Mental Health Review Journal: Research, Policy and Practice, 16(3), 102-106. https://doi.org/10.1108/13619321111178041
• Woods, A. (2011). Post-Narrative: An Appeal. Narrative Inquiry, 21(2), 399-406. https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.21.2.20woo