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.
Projects
A Historical and Critical Neuroscience of Music
Selected Publications
Kennaway, J. (2016). Lebenskraft, the body and will power: the life force in German musical aesthetics. In J. McCarthy (
Read MoreEd. ), 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.
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 (
Read MoreEd. ), Music, neurology, and neuroscience. History and modern perspektives (pp. 127-145). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Kennaway, J. (
Read MoreEd. ). (2014). Music and the nerves. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kennaway, J. (2014). The long history of neurology and music. In J. Kennaway (
Read MoreEd. ), Music and the nerves, 1700-1900 (pp. 1-17). Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
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 (
Read MoreEd. ), Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920 (pp. 141-160). Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Past Events
Colloquium
Anna O.’s Nervous Cough: Historical Perspectives on Neurological and Psychological Approaches to Music
MORE