Virginia Langum is professor in English literature at Umeå University and director of the Faculty of Arts Doctoral College at Umeå University. She is also coordinator for the Umeå Medical Humanities Network. Since 2021, she has been editor, with Professor Terry Walker, of The Nordic Journal of English Studies.
In the autumn of 2024, she will take up a STINT teaching sabbatical at the National University of Singapore.
She is a former Pro Futura Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study at Uppsala University, research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University, and member of Sweden's Young Academy.
Her research concerns medicine, literature and culture, particularly the connections between the body and religious experience, as well as medicine and ethics, extending from the Middle Ages to our own period.
She is currently working on historical projects about migration and health and medical tourism.
Before she moved to Sweden, she completed her PhD in English at the University of Cambridge. She also has a master's degree in Medieval and Renaissance Literature also from Cambridge, a master's degree in journalism from Columbia, and a bachelor's degree in English from Trinity College, Dublin.
She welcomes PhD proposals in the areas of medieval and early modern literature; literature and the body; literature and medicine; medical humanities; historicism; historical fiction.
Please see her personal Web site.
She teaches academic writing, literary theory and methods, medieval literature, as well "Blaming the Body: Ethics, Medicine and Culture in Western Europe"; "Narrating Madness in Literature and Culture"; "Motifs of Madness", "Literature and Disability", and "Literature and Medicine".