Dr Stella Bolaki

Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities. Her research, creative practice and public-facing work explore questions of health, care, embodiment and lived experience across literary, cultural and interdisciplinary contexts.

Originally from Greece, Stella joined the University of Kent in 2011. She previously held a lectureship at the University of Glasgow and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, where she completed her MSc and PhD, with her PhD funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Stella’s research draws on American and contemporary literature, life writing, critical medical humanities, disability studies, Black feminist studies and cultural theory, with particular interests in illness narratives, care, testimony and lived experience. Her first monograph, Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Rodopi, 2011), examined coming-of-age narratives in an ethnic American and postcolonial context, focusing on writers including Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston and Audre Lorde. She also co-edited Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), which explored the international influence of Lorde’s writing and activism. Her second monograph, Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), developed her work in medical humanities by examining how illness experience is represented through diverse artistic and cultural forms, including photography, artists’ books, performance, film, theatre, animation and digital media. Her wider research has explored women’s health, chronic illness, disability, graphic memoir, embodied aesthetics and the ethics of care, with current work examining the changing meanings and uses of self-care in contemporary literary and cultural contexts.

Alongside this scholarship, Stella has developed a longstanding creative and practice-led research programme that brings collaborative and embodied approaches to the study of lived experience. She is particularly interested in artists’ books as forms of community arts for health, care and social justice. This work has received funding from the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy, Research England and Kent’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Account. Her research into artists’ books led to the creation of the Prescriptions: Artists’ Books special collection, as well as exhibitions, creative workshops and doctoral training. Relevant publications include the co-edited volume Prescriptions: Artists’ Books on Wellbeing and Medicine, a special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities, and contributions to the Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability and the Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities.

Her recent Mothers After Adoption project centres on artists’ book workshops she has designed and delivered with mothers affected by non-consensual adoption in the UK, exploring how making artists’ books can support alternative forms of testimony and offer creative approaches to working with people experiencing family separation and trauma. The project has generated co-authored scholarship on creative testimony, epistemic injustice and mothers’ encounters with adoption law and policy, alongside exhibitions, professional training and public engagement that bring survivor testimony into civic and policy spaces and contribute to discussions of historical and contemporary adoption practices.

Building on this interdisciplinary and public-facing work, Stella is developing a new literary-cultural project on maternal dispossession, examining how literature, life writing, film, visual culture and archival testimony have represented mothers separated from their children through adoption and state intervention. The project investigates cultural constructions of the ‘unfit’ or ‘impossible’ mother and the figure of the ‘invisible mother’, bringing feminist, disability and medical humanities perspectives into dialogue with histories of child removal. It also explores maternal testimony and counter-archives as ways of challenging dominant narratives of motherhood and maternal loss.

Stella teaches a variety of modules across all stages in American and contemporary literature, including “Other Worlds: Dystopias and Futures”, “American Power, American Protest”, “Becoming America”, “American Modernities” and “Cross-Cultural Coming-of-Age Narratives”. She contributes lectures and postgraduate seminars on topics such as illness narratives, the politics of self-care, disability theory and artists’ books, and has designed and delivered student-selected components (SSCs) in the medical humanities for the Kent and Medway Medical School.

 Her approach to teaching has been shaped by her interdisciplinary research interests, creative practice, collaboration and outreach, with a particular emphasis on affective and embodied ways of learning. Stella is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has served as external examiner for taught programmes and PhDs in several institutions.