Nicola Von Bodman-Hensler

In her current work Nicola examines the connections between medicine and literature looking at the ways in which medical narratives such as the medical case history and literature intersect and influence one another. Her research interest centres on the nineteenth-century and contemporary Western tradition of illness narratives with emphasis on British, American, and German cultural and literary imaginations of bodily disorder. She currently engages with the connections between nineteenth-century perceptions of bodily disorder and postmodern explorations of sickness and health. Her main focus here lies on the tradition of writing illness shaped by German author Thomas Mann and Philip Roth’s appropriation of this tradition of writing in his work. Nicola also has an interest in the cultural history of the book and publishing, psychoanalysis and literature, and life-writing themes.

Nicola holds a Wellcome PhD Award at the Centre for the Humanities and Health where she is working on the ‘Illness Narrative as Life-Writing’ research strand.

Before taking the MA in English Literature here at King’s in 2009, Nicola completed her BA at the University of Augsburg, Germany, in 2008, where she read European Cultural History, English Literature, and Social Sciences.

intersections between medicine and literature

the cultural history of the body

contemporary English and American literature