Felicity Callard

Felicity Callard is an academic who works on twentieth- and twenty-first century psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis and cognitive neuroscience. She is currently Director of Hubbub (the first residency of The Hub at Wellcome Collection), a large interdisciplinary project which is conducting research on rest (and its opposites) in mental health, neuroscience, the arts and the every day. 

Felicity has a background in the social sciences (including human geography, qualitative research methods) and in the history and sociology of psychiatry. She is Reader in Social Science for Medical Humanities at Durham University and Visiting Researcher at the Service User Research Enterprise (SURE) (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London) – a research unit in which most researchers are or have been mental health service users themselves.

She is first author of Mental Illness, Discrimination and the Law: Fighting for Social Justice, which addresses how legislation can be used to combat the discrimination and abuse experienced by people with psycho-social disabilities. Felicity has spoken nationally and internationally on issues ranging from service user leadership in mental health research, the involvement of service users in all stages of mental health research, the ethical use of electronic mental health records, and ethical and social implications of different models of psychopathology and of diagnosis. Felicity has also worked independently as a consultant in mental health, participating in projects addressing discrimination, social inequalities and injustice in relation to mental health.

Felicity was Chair of the Board of Trustees of MDAC from March 2011-March 2015.

Felicity was educated at The Johns Hopkins University (PhD), the University of Sussex (MA) and the University of Oxford (BA(Hons)).