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About Us

The Neurodivergent Humanities Network is a safe and generative space that accommodates the diverse, individual needs of scholars working in the humanities, while offering a shared sense of community and support.

We believe that centering neurodivergent perspectives in academia and beyond will pave new avenues for collaboration, research, and methodological development. We explore new modes of thinking, being, and doing research in ways that better support our needs within and beyond institutional structures and practices. The research model we are developing will reject the prevailing deficit model in neurodivergence discourse; we seek to reframe best practices as teaching, learning, and research methods that can support the diverse needs and skills within our community in an academic environment.

Meet the Leadership Team

Dr Louise Creechan is a Lecturer in the Literary Medical Humanities at Durham University, a Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow, and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. Her research focuses broadly on Victorian literature with specific interests in neurodiversity, disability, and the history of (not) reading – with a side hustle in neo-Victorian musical theatre. Her first monograph, Unwriting Victorian Illiteracy: Questioning the Primacy of Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, is currently under-review. She is the PI of Neurodivergent Humanities, co-editor of Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2025), and an advocate for accessible research practice.
Ria’s research interests in neurodiversity, genre fiction, higher education, disability, and EDI cross disciplines and she identifies variously as a literature scholar, disability studies scholar, or medical humanities scholar. She is currently a researcher on the Disabled Researchers Hub at Liverpool John Moores University, which aims to break down the barriers disabled and neurodivergent researchers face in higher education. Her book Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction is available open access.
Alice Hagopian started her PhD in French studies at Queen’s University Belfast in October 2023. She was awarded an AHRC Northern Bridge studentship, and her thesis is tentatively entitled ‘Neuroqueering French Literature from Flaubert to Wittig (1857-1984).
Dr Daniel P. Jones is a crip-queer disability scholar and creative practitioner who is currently focusing on Tourette Syndrome, public space and inclusive research methodologies. He is currently in post as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, working in/around anti-ableist research cultures.
Abs works as Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. Their research forges new connections between critical neurodiversity studies, (neuro)queer and trans studies. They’re mostly writing about asociality and nonnormative affect.
Nicola Simonetti is a Bridging Fellow in Medical Humanities at Durham University. He specialises in Critical Neurodiversity Studies, Critical Disability Studies, and Comparative Literature, with research interests that span three main areas: neurodiversity and dis/ability deployments in literary and science fiction; the interplay between epistemologies of ‘the contemporary’ and crip time; OCD

Meet the Advisory Board

Our Advisory Board members are in important part of the core network activities, providing guidance on strategic directions, acting as ambassadors for the network, and contributing to various network events and activities.

David Lombard, Research Foundation Flanders ( FWO) / University of Leuven (KU Leuven)
https://davidlombard.net/

Dr Owen Rees, Lecturer in Applied Humanities, Birmingham Newman University
https://www.newman.ac.uk/staff/owen-rees-2/

Ombre Tarragnat, Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis
www.ombretarragnat.com

Dr Amanda Tink, University of South Australia
https://people.unisa.edu.au/Amanda.Tink

Melvin Thomas, PhD Scholar in Medical Humanities

Acknowledging Network Founders

Sarinah co-founded the Neurodivergent Humanities Network in 2022 during the second year of her English Literature PhD at Aberdeen University. Her thesis focused on lived experiences of autism as presented through first-person narratives, and, recognising the power of collective storytelling in reclaiming a sense of identity and challenging pathological interpretations of neurodivergence, was keen to put these ideas into practice. The Neurodivergent Humanities Network provided an opportunity to collaborate with other neurodivergent scholars and community members to transform methods of teaching, creating, and learning, towards a more ethical form of scholarship that makes room for all kinds of difference. As well as being an independent researcher, she works full-time at a charity that helps disabled people find employment. She hopes to publish her thesis as a book in 2026.
Arya Thampuran is an Assistant Professor (Research) at the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. She is the current Principal Investigator on the Wellcome Trust-funded Black Health and the Humanities Network.
Leni Van Goidsenhoven is Assistant Professor of (critical) disability studies at the Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.