James Kennaway wearing a hat and siting on a stone in a park
Alumni

James Kennaway

Visiting Scholar (Feb 2017-Mar 2017)

PhD, Historian of Medicine, Groningen University

James Kennaway is a Historian of Medicine at Groningen University, having previously worked at Oxford, Stanford, Vienna, Durham, and Newcastle Universities. His work examines the interactions between science, medicine and culture since the Enlightenment. In particular, he has written extensively on the relationship between medicine and music, notably in his monograph Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease and in articles on musical hypnosis and brainwashing, and on gynaecological and psychiatric critiques of female musical education. He has also written about theories connecting the mind to the digestion, the idea that reading books can make you ill and on Chladni sound figures.

Projekte

No current projects were found for this scholar.

A Historical and Critical Neuroscience of Music

MEHR

Selected Publications

Kennaway, J. (2016). Lebenskraft, the body and will power: the life force in German musical aesthetics. In J. McCarthy (Ed.), The early history of embodied cognition 1740-1920. The Lebenskraft-debate and radical reality in German science, music, and literature (pp. 125-143). Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (2016). Two kinds of "literary poison": diseases of the learned and overstimulating novels in Georgian Britain. Literature and Medicine, 34(2), 252-277.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (2015). Can music make you ill? The history of pathology music. In S. Finger (Ed.), Music, neurology, and neuroscience. History and modern perspektives (pp. 127-145). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (Ed.). (2014). Music and the nerves. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (2014). The long history of neurology and music. In J. Kennaway (Ed.), Music and the nerves, 1700-1900 (pp. 1-17). Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (2012). Bad vibrations: the history of the idea of music as a cause of disease. Farnham: Ashgate.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (2012). Musical hypnosis: sound and self from mesmer to brainwashing. Social history of medicine, 25(2), 271-289.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (2012). Pathologische Musik im "Zauberberg". Thomas-Mann-Studien, 49, 17-35.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (2011). Stimulating music: the pleasures and dangers of 'electric music' 1750-1900. Configurations, 19(2), 191-211.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (2011). The piano plague: the nineteenth-century medical critique of female musical education. Gesnerus, 68(1), 26-40.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (2010). From sensibility to pathology: the origins of nervous music. Journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences, 68(3), 396-426.

Read More

Kennaway, J. (2007). Singing the body electric. Nervous music and Sexuality in fin-de-siècle literature. In A. Stiles (Ed.), Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920 (pp. 141-160). Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Read More

Past Events