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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 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 is an aspiring PhD researcher working on French Literature and critical neurodiversity studies; she is a postgraduate administrator for Neurodivergent Humanities.
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

Acknowledging Network Founders

Sarinah O’Donoghue is a PhD researcher at the University of Aberdeen; she is interested in the intersection of ecocriticism and critical neurodiversity studies and works on autism in contemporary literature. She is a postgraduate administrator for Neurodivergent Humanities.
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.