The Body
This interdisciplinary research group focusses on the body as a bio-cultural construct in antiquity and modernity.
urrent research projects and collaborations evolve around the fields of socio-anthropology of body and pain, as well as related socio-religious practises. Some of our researchers address bodily experience and emotions as lived experiences with an extra focus on aging as a complex process with culture-specific elaborations and socio-political ramifications, while others focus more on disability studies, ancient and modern patient history, pain history, and the culture-specific conceptions and elaborations of the body in its medical and religious contexts. Artistic representations of bodies and body parts lie also at the heart of this group’s research interests.
Examples of individual projects include the De/Constructing the Body: Ancient and Modern Dynamics project, a project funded by the Wellcome Trust and co-directed by Petridou (UoL) and Eidinow (Bristol).
Nathaniel Highmore, Corporis humani disquisi, Engraving, 1651. A monument within which is suspended the flayed skin of a man, with a canal system as an allegory of the circulation of blood, and other allegories of anatomy. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)