Dr Josie Billington

National Teaching Fellow 2015 Dr Josie Billington specialises in English (Victorian literature) and in Medical Humanities (reading and health). She has taught across the range of genres, periods and programmes in English Literature (Renaissance to Modernism, undergraduate to PhD, extra-mural/community) and has initiated a range of award-winning volunteering programmes for English students, enabling them to take their subject and literary skills into community life. Her publications include Faithful Realism: Elizabeth Gaskell and Leo Tolstoy (2002), and This is Living Art: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (2012). Josie is editor of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (2006), Margaret Oliphant's Novellas (2013), Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 21st Century Oxford Authors (2014). She has recently completed an edition of George Eliot's shorter fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, for Oxford University Press. She has written numerous student guides, including George Eliot's Middlemarch (Continuum, 2008), Middlemarch (Connell Guides, 2012), and Jane Eyre (Connell Guides, 2014). Josie has published extensively on the power of literary reading to influence mental health and wellbeing, particularly in the areas of depression and dementia. She is currently engaged in interdisciplinary research projects related to chronic pain, women prisoners, reading with children and families, and the psychology of reading, with colleagues in Medicine, Health and Psychological Sciences. Her monograph 'Is Literature Healthy?' (Oxford University Press) will appear in 2016. This research has laid the foundation for pedagogical innovations which bring health professionals into the orbit of English Studies (via an interdisciplinary MA Reading in Practice), and take literary reading into the medical curriculum. These initiatives have sought to broaden the contexts in which English Literature operates, abandoning conventional disciplinary boundaries whilst preserving the integrity of the art itself. Josie is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College. She is a regular speaker for the Princes Teaching Institute and has spoken at national events on her pedagogical innovation as well as publishing on these initiatives for Routledge and Palgrave.