Rate My Professor Fiona Johnstone

Johnstone joined the Durham Institute for Medical Humanities in 2018 as Associate Editor for The Polyphony, advancing to Acting Editor in Chief from 2019 to 2020. She served as Principal Investigator for the Wellcome-funded project “Thinking Through Things” (2019-2021), which advanced the visual and material turn in medical humanities. From 2021 to 2023, she held the United Kingdom's inaugural postdoctoral research associate position in visual medical humanities. Additionally, she co-directed the interdisciplinary series Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities (2021-2023), culminating in the field-defining edited volume Art and the Critical Medical Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2026). Her recent peer-reviewed articles include “What can art history offer medical humanities?” co-authored with Suzannah Biernoff (Medical Humanities, 2024), “Picture an epidemic: contemporary culture and HIV” (The Lancet, 2024), and “Collaborations in art and medicine: institutional critique, patient participation, and emerging entanglements” (Leonardo, 2023). Currently, Johnstone is developing a new monograph tentatively titled Critical Interlopers: artists as researchers and collaborators in healthcare and medicine. Through her leadership roles, editorial work, and publications, she has made substantial contributions to the integration of art historical methods into medical humanities research.