Professor Martin Halliwell

I am an intellectual, cultural and literary historian by training and have published twelve monographs, five co-edited volumes and forty articles and chapters. Much of my most recent published work fall within the health humanities and is exemplified by two prize-winning recent books, American Health Crisis: One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning and Politics (University of California Press, 2021) and Transformed States: Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture, 1990-2020 (Rutgers University Press, 2025).

My most recent publication is the co-edited volume, American Literature and Therapeutic Cultures (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), co-edited with Nicholas Manning. I have nearly finished my thirteenth monograph, Wellness and the White House: From the Bicentennial to America 250 and have started on my fourteenth, The Wellness Equation: A Cultural History of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

I have been Head of School twice at the University of Leicester (2008-13; 2017-21); Deputy PVC International and the College Director of International Strategy (2013-18); and since 2022 I have been working in research leadership at school and college level. I was a REF2014 and REF2021 subpanelist for UoA27 English Language and Literature and for REF2029 I am an assessor for the Area Studies UoA25 subpanel.

My research interests span American cultural and intellectual history, the health humanities and disability studies, twentieth-century and contemporary American fiction, American film after 1945, the history of popular music, critical theory, psychoanalysis and the history of psychology, urban cultures, the avant-garde, and cultures of protest.

American Literature and Therapeutic Cultures, co-edited with Nicholas Manning (University of Edinburgh Press, 2026)

Transformed States: Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2025)

Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health, co-edited with Sophie A. Jones (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

American Health Crisis: One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics (University of California Press, 2021)

Voices of Mental Health: Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970–2000 (Rutgers University Press, 2017)

Neil Young: American Traveller (Reaktion and University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945–1970 (Rutgers University Press, hbk 2013, pbk 2014)

Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011) [co-authored with Paul Hegarty]

American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh University, 2007)

The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture (American Intellectual Culture series, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, February 2004; reissued by Routledge in 2016).

Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh University Press, 2003) [co-authored with Andrew Mousley]

Modernism and Morality: Ethical Devices in Transatlantic Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2001). Republished in an updated paperback edition as Transatlantic Modernism: Moral Dilemmas in Modernist Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

I am keen to supervise projects at PhD and MA level that fall within the following areas:

• Twentieth-Century American Fiction
• The History of Medicine and Psychology
• Mental Health (History, Culture, Politics)
• Disability and Modern/Contemporary Culture
• American Film 1945-2000
• 1950s and 1960s American Culture
• American and European Modernism
• American Intellectual History
• Transatlantic Literature and Culture
• The Avant-Garde
• American Visual Culture
• American Ethnicity and Race
• Cultures of Protest

I teach across the range of American literature from the Revolutionary period to contemporary America, with a special interest in early twentieth-century literature, post-World War II American fiction, film and visual culture, critical theory and popular music.

BA English, University of Exeter

MA Critical Theory, University of Exeter

PhD American Studies, University of Nottingham

Global MBA with Marketing, University of Leicester

Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy

ILM Award Level 7 in Strategic Leadership