Today, we welcome Claire Jeantils to the Platform, who joins us as a 2024-25 Bridging Fellow in the Narrative Practices Lab and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. She works in comparative literature and medical humanities, and holds a PhD from the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris. Her fellowship aims to establish an International Narrative Neurology Network, to collaborate with Bordeaux Montaigne University and the University Hospital of Bordeaux to design a postdoctoral project on narrative approaches to epilepsy, and to advocate for critical medical humanities research in France.
1. If your research was a film, what would the title be?
Actually, it wouldn’t need to be a new one. Paterson by Jim Jarmusch echoes pretty well some of my work focus, such as thinking about what care can look like for different people and at various times. It makes room for fragments, contradictions, and the mundane but also questions what temporality is. It does not necessarily force experience into a narrative arc.
2. What will you be doing during your Bridging Fellowship?
My research analyses epilepsy narratives in all their forms and diversity and focuses on why and how narrative medicine might be an interesting approach to epilepsy care. So, during this fellowship, I will work on designing a postdoctoral project aiming to adapt Narrative Medicine to epileptology in the clinical space.
I will also create a network that brings critical medical humanities to the forefront of narrative neurology, opening new avenues of research and cross-sector collaborations.
3. What expertise and experiences will you be drawing on during the fellowship?
During my fellowship, I will draw on my experiential knowledge of epilepsy and caring for someone with epilepsy to think through adaptative methodologies. I will also draw on my expertise in French and Francophone Humanities scholarship to participate in the Platform’s exciting multilingualism and hopefully help the field grow in new directions.
4. Why are you excited about working in The Platform?
I am particularly excited by the diversity of people and research topics the Platform brings together, as well as the potential intersections and collaborations this space will bring to life. After experiencing many online research events, I am also excited to share ideas, be inspired, and discuss work-in-progress research with colleagues more spontaneously and in different contexts.
5. What changes would you like to see as a result of your research?
The critical medical humanities have sometimes been hesitant to think of narrative medicine outside the narrative turn lens, and narrative medicine has been reluctant to acknowledge the need for illness-led or speciality-led adaptations. I hope my research will help bridge the divide between the two by reorienting the critical lens towards implementability from a lived experience perspective.
More broadly, I always hope my projects help change the way epilepsies and people with epilepsy are perceived and cared for in both social and clinical contexts.
6. What interests or hobbies do you have outside your research that might surprise people?
Most of my interests outside my research are predictable (reading, writing, walking, practicing yoga). However, one thing that might surprise people upon meeting me is that I love taking risks or trying a new hobby. I particularly enjoy being surprised and unsettled by an activity, from testing out water colouring (and being bad at it) to hitchhiking in unfamiliar places, for example.
