Leadership Team

Rebecca Flemming

Centre Director

Professor Flemming’s research focuses on ancient medicine in its social and cultural context, with special attention to gender, sexuality, and reproduction. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, using literary texts and material objects as well as modern scientific evidence to explore disease, health and healing, the full range of patients and practitioners in the Greek and Roman worlds, and to investigate the diversity of understandings and debates about the human body. The Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health widens the space for multi-disciplinarity, focusing on the many intersections between the humanities, social sciences, health, disease and medical knowledge.

Alex Hillman

Centre Deputy Director

Alex is Associate professor in Sociology and the Centre’s Deputy Director. Her research focuses on the care of older people in emergency and acute care, and, more recently, with the social and ethical aspects of dementia diagnosis and what it means to live well with dementia.

Luna Dolezal

Luna is Professor of Philosophy and Medical Humanities. Her research is primarily in the areas of applied phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities. She is driven by an interest in understanding lived experience and embodiment, and how these intersect with, are co-determined by, the socio-political and technological frameworks in which we are enmeshed.

Michael Flexer

Michael is a lecturer in English and director of Liberal Arts. His research and teaching interests include: semiotics; mental health and particularly ‘psychosis’; time; the medical encounter and diagnosis; Marxist and (post)structuralist critical theories. He is deeply committed to interdisciplinary and engaged research.

Felicity Thomas

Felicity is Professor of Culture and Health Inequalities in the Department of Health and Community Sciences, and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Culture and Health. Her work focuses on understanding and addressing health and social care inequalities. She is an applied social scientist with an interdisciplinary background, drawing mainly on narrative, ethnographic and engaged research methods.