Fashionable Diseases - The People
Professor Clark Lawlor,
Professor of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at Northumbria University, is the project's Director. 
He has worked for twenty years on representations and narratives of the body and mind, particularly disease, in literature. He has published many books and essays investigating the way in which our historical experience of illness has been mediated by language, literature, and the different social worlds that we inhabit. He is fascinated by the apparent paradox that some diseases can be seen as a positive benefit to the sufferer, even though other social groups might satirize and stigmatise 'fashionable' conditions. His publications include Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006) and From Melancholia to Prozac: a History of Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Between 2006 and 2009 he was Co-Director of the Leverhulme Trust project 'Before Depression, 1660-1800: The Representation and Culture of the English Malady' (see www.beforedepression.com). Publications arising from this included Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century (2012, with Stuart Sim, Richard Terry, John Baker and Leigh Wetherall-Dickson) and Clark Lawlor and Valérie Maffre (eds.), Figures et culture de la dépression (1660-1800) / The Representation and Culture of Depression, the European Spectator, vols 10 and 11, ed. (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2011).