Dr Megan Coyer
Senior Lecturer in English Literature
megan.coyer@glasgow.ac.uk
http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/staff/megancoyer/
Megan Coyer is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow and Deputy Director of the Medical Humanities Research Centre. She specialises in nineteenth-century literature and medical culture, and has a particular interest in the Scottish context. She is currently a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Young Academy of Scotland. Her first monograph, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817-1858 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) examined how the Romantic-era periodical press cultivated innovative ideologies, literary forms, and discourses which shaped and reflected medical culture. Her work on this monograph was funded by a three-year Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship, ‘The Medical Blackwoodians and Medico-literary Synergy in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press’. She has also co-edited (with Dr David Shuttleton), Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832 (Rodopi, 2014).
Her PhD work (also at the University of Glasgow) was on James Hogg, ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’, and the little-known Glaswegian surgeon and writer, Robert Macnish (1802-37), and she has published several articles/book chapters on these two writers and the interplay between science and the literary imagination in Romantic-era Scotland. One of her current projects is editing James Hogg’s Contributions to Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country for the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg. This textual editing project is funded by a Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant.
Coyer led the Wellcome Trust-funded project, ‘Glasgow University Medical Humanities Network Website’, which established the University of Glasgow network in 2016. She is currently on the steering group for the Wellcome Trust-funded project, ‘Glasgow Medical Humanities Network’, which is substantively expanding this network to universities and collections across the city of Glasgow.
Research and Teaching Interests
My research interests are primarily in the field of ‘Literature and Medicine’, particularly within the Scottish cultural context and within nineteenth-century literature more broadly. I am also interested in illness narratives, physician-writers, and popular medical writing, and I am open to cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Keywords:
Case HistoriesEmbodimentHistory of MedicineIllness NarrativesLiteratureLiterature and MedicineNineteenth CenturyPeriodical PressPhysician-writersScotland
Projects:
- Attentive Writers: Healthcare, Authorship and Authority
- Cocaine and Cultural Mythology
- Cognition, Consciousness, and Dualism in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace
- Medical Humanities Discussion Group
- Medical Humanities Research Network Scotland
- On Not Reading the Victorian Novel
- Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932): Physician-Writer of the British Empire
- Stigmatised Health Issues in Scottish Fiction 1979-present
- The Medical Blackwoodians and Medico-Literary Synergy in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
- The Nineteenth-Century Asylum Periodical: The Origins and Early Development of Periodical Publishing in Mental Institutions in Britain, America and Beyond
Teaching Materials:
- Embodiments: Literature and Medicine 1750-1900 (English Literature, Victorian MLitt)
- Intercalated BSc in Medical Humanities
- Literature and Medicine (English Literature, junior honours)
- Literature and Medicine (English Literature, senior honours)
- Medical Culture (Prinicia Consortium, Scottish Literature)
- Writing in the Medical Humanities (College of Arts, level 3)