Dr Jennifer Patterson BA Joint Hons, BSc Hons, PGDipHE, PGDip, PGDipMS, MPhil, PhD

Jennifer Patterson is the current elected President of the Association for Medical Humanities. She is an academic with an Irish background, a part-time Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences at the University of Greenwich and a practising Complementary Therapist of 15 years. 

An interdisciplinary feminist critical theorist, her doctoral research background is in radical embodied readings of 20th Century French Surrealist literature and art history from UCL, London. Her teaching focuses on professional health and education doctoral students. Since 2006, she has led a significant number of externally funded research and enterprise projects. Her view is that writing is activism, often based on experience, related to equity, rights and social justice, questioning cultural and ethical assumptions. Covering a range of topics it uses an interdisciplinary toolbox of applied feminist theory and sociology with creative use of linguistic visual and verbal methods such as discourse analysis and narrative analysis. Her research and publishing uses theory to question and disrupt normative assumptions in two key interdisciplinary areas: the Medical/Health Humanities and Sustainability Education. Latterly these combine in a focus on sustainable health with particular reference to Women's life-course events, such as Sustainable Development Goals and menstrual hygiene practices, pain and language, and thinking with and without a uterus. She is interested in the practical application of research projects that she is involved in, has written on impact and been nominated for impact awards. For many years Jennifer was a visiting lecturer on the MA in Women's Studies at Ruskin College, Oxford. She has worked as an editor and translator outside of academia, has trained in Narrative medicine with Rita Charon in New York and is currently working on the Listening to Patients' Project. She organised the international Body Talk: Whose language Conference in 2017 at the University of Greenwich which has culminated in the publication of Body Talk in Medical Humanities: Whose language with Francia Kinchington in 2019.

Posts held previously:

• 2005-08, Associate Lecturer, Department of Humanities (online Interdisciplinary Humanities), The Open University
• 2001-06, Self-employed freelance writer, translator, editor and subeditor
• 1997-2003: Self-employed lecturer and travel consultant
• 1989-96: PT/FT Retail Manager and Buyer
• 1984-89: Lecturer, Courtauld Gallery