Felicity Callard

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Ph.D.

Residence: March 1, 2011 - February 29, 2012

Profile

Background

Felicity Callard is a social scientist and humanities scholar with an interdisciplinary background that includes the history and sociology of psychiatry, critical theory, and urban geography.  Her doctorate entailed working at the intersection of the humanities, history of psychiatry, cultural studies and social theory. Specifically, she explored the genealogy of agoraphobia from its emergence as a named condition in the 1870s to its gradual supersession by Panic Disorder in DSM-III, IIIR and IV. She has broad research interests in the history and living present of psychiatry and psychoanalysis (including investigations of "the affective turn" within the social sciences and the humanities and its use of neuroscientific findings, and the emergence of neuro-psychoanalysis). One new strand of her research comprises an interrogation of models of self, pathology, and the experimental subject within the neurosciences and biological psychiatry. At the MPIWG, she is working on "The Neurological Adolescent" research programme (directed by Dr Suparna Choudhury), and is investigating how the adolescent has been configured (from the late nineteenth century to the present) as a daydreamer through the scientific study of her mental states.  This research intersects with an ongoing exploration of the emergent field of resting state functional neuroimaging research -- in which the constructs and phenomena of daydreaming and mind-wandering are becoming increasingly central.

Education

She was educated at The Johns Hopkins University (PhD), the University of Sussex (MA) and the University of Oxford (BA (Hons)). She has held lectureships at Queen Mary and Royal Holloway (both colleges of the University of London) and a research fellowship at the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health (South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London).

Mental Health and Human Rights

Felicity is Chair of the Board of MDAC (The Mental Disability Advocacy Center; see http://www.mdac.info). MDAC is an international human rights NGO that advances the human rights of children and adults with actual or perceived intellectual or psycho-social (mental health) disabilities. MDAC currently focuses on Europe and Africa. It uses a combination of law, advocacy, capacity-building and research to pursue six human rights goals (right to legal capacity; right to live in the community; freedom from ill-treatment; right to inclusive education; access to justice; right to political participation).