Dr Stella Bolaki

BA, Athens; MSc, PhD, Edinburgh

Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Health and Medical Humanities.

She joined the University of Kent in 2011, having previously held a lectureship at the University of Glasgow. She has taught at the University of Edinburgh, where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH). She has been Co-Director of Scottish Universities’ International Summer School, which offers courses in literature, creative writing and theatre and performance.

Stella’s interdisciplinary scholarly expertise spans contemporary American literary studies and medical humanities and includes years of practical, creative and public-facing work on the topics of health and wellbeing.

Stella’s primary research specialisms are in narratives of illness and disability, critical medical humanities and in ethnic American literature. They further include Black feminist studies and cultural theory. Her first monograph Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Rodopi, 2011) considers the continuing relevance of the Bildungsroman (or coming-of-age narrative) in an ethnic American and postcolonial context, focusing on the work of Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston and Audre Lorde. Stella has also co-edited Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) that documents the influence of Lorde’s writing and activism beyond the United States.

 Stella’s second monograph Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) is part of her medical humanities research that has focused on illness experience and its significance in the field. Shifting attention beyond traditional narrative/literary modes of communicating illness experience that have dominated medical humanities, the book considers a wide variety of media and artistic forms including photography, artists’ books, performance art, film, theatre, animation and online narratives. Stella’s work on topics such as women’s health, chronic illness, disability, self-care, and illness aesthetics has appeared in Literature and Medicine, Mosaic, Medical Humanities, Textual Practice, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies and Life Writing.

Stella’s research in contemporary artistic practice relating to health, illness and disability is collaborative and public facing and has received funding from the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy, Research England and Kent’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Account scheme. Her ongoing work seeks to expand the traditional practitioners and audiences of artists’ books in the context of community arts for health and social justice. The project Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities established the Prescriptions: Artists’ Books special collection that has informed exhibitions, creative workshops and doctoral training programmes. Ideas relating to Stella’s research on artists’ books have appeared in the exhibition catalogue and co-edited volume of essays Prescriptions: Artists’ books on wellbeing and medicine, a guest-edited special issue for the Journal of Medical Humanities, essays for the Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability and the Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities, as well as in blog posts for The Polyphony and the British Academy. Currently, she is engaged in a collaborative project that explores the uses of artist’s book workshops for mothers grappling with the profound emotional impact of having their children removed and placed for adoption. Linked to this project, she is developing these workshops as a creative intervention to support alternative forms of testimony-sharing in the context of UK public inquiries about survivors’ experiences of family separation.

Stella is also writing a new monograph that examines the concept of self-care across a range of contemporary contexts and literary genres to sharpen its meanings and relevance in an age of inequality, burnout, mental health anxiety and climate change. This project draws on historical, philosophical, medical, activist and other interdisciplinary material.

Stella teaches a variety of modules in American and contemporary literature and contributes to health and medical humanities teaching for the Kent and Medway Medical School. Her approach to teaching has been shaped by her interdisciplinary research interests, collaboration and outreach. Stella is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has served as external examiner for taught programmes and PhDs in several institutions.    

Stella has supervised PhDs on a wide range of topics including literature and neuroscience; speculative fiction; crafts and making as affective social practices; mental health across different media; addiction; disability and illness in postcolonial fiction; and creative/critical writing projects exploring the body and embodied practices. She was successful in securing a CHASE-funded collaborative doctoral award to co-supervise a project on the culture, politics and lived experience of health in Wellcome Collection’s zines. She would be keen to supervise doctoral and postdoctoral research relating to any of her research interests and enjoys working as part of cross-disciplinary supervisory teams. She would particularly welcome topics informed by the medical/health humanities and disability studies.  

Stella is on the editorial board of the Contemporary Cultural Studies in Illness, Health and Medicine series (Edinburgh University Press), and acts as Editorial Adviser for the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. She has peer-reviewed for various publishers and journals, including the University of Massachusetts Press, the University of Toronto Press, Liverpool University Press, Palgrave, Literature and Medicine, Medical Humanities, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Studies in the Novel, MELUS, Journal of American Studies, Symbiosis, and The Year’s Work in English Studies.

In addition to leading and supporting various collaborative research projects for Kent’s Centre for Health and Medical Humanities, she is on the steering committee of the Eastern Arc Medical and Health Humanities Network. She is also affiliated with The Inclusive Women’s Health Research Group.

Stella has co-organised and contributed to numerous academic and public events, including: ‘Audre Lorde’s Legacy: A Film and Cultural Festival’ (2012); ‘Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities’ (2016); ‘The Art of Dying Well’ roundtable, hosted by Pilgrims Hospices for Kent’s International Arts Festival (2017); ‘Tell me What Hurts: Storytelling and the Healing Arts’ (Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England, 2018), the British Academy’s Summer Showcase (2019); ‘Mending the Psyche: Art as Reparation’ (Birkbeck, University of London, 2022); ‘High Street Social Club’ (Discovery Planet, Ramsgate, 2024). In her role on the advisory board of the Kent Medical Humanities Network, she co-organises an annual regional medical humanities conference and works closely with Leads in medical humanities and medical education from Kent NHS Trusts.

Stella’s administrative experience at Kent has included the roles of Internationalisation Director in English, Deputy Director of PhD studies in the Centre for American Studies, and Chair of the Research Ethics Advisory Group for Arts and Humanities. She has also served as Academic Mentor for the Eastern ARC Mentoring Scheme.