Dr Stephen Fay
About
Biography
I am a Medical Humanities scholar who combines expertise in Hispanic literatures with innovative research into digital creative therapies for people with dementia in Latin America and the UK.
In 2019 (with support from the Global Challenges Research Fund) I established the UK’s first research collaboration with the world-leading Antioquia Neuroscience Group (GNA) in Colombia. I brought together a multi-centre (GNA, Aston University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Columbia University) and interdisciplinary team (neurologists, psychologists, speech therapists, humanities scholars) to design and deliver research into the use of creative narratives to support the mental health and wellbeing of people with dementia and their families.
COVID-19 obliged us to adapt our in-person methodologies to virtual delivery, turning our original 10-week pilot study into an 8-month creativity and community lifeline for our participants and their families. On the basis of this success, we are now running a full feasibility and effectiveness study of the online provision of psychosocial interventions for people with dementia in Latin America, with future extension into the UK.
I joined the University of Surrey in February 2022. I previously taught Spanish and Latin American Studies at UCL, KCL, the University of Nottingham and Aston University.
I warmly welcome enquiries from potential PhD candidates in areas of specialism such as Hispanic Studies, Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies, Medical Humanities and Dementia Studies.
Areas of specialism
My qualifications
News
In the media
ResearchResearch interests
My main research interests are in the fields of Medical Humanities, Dementia Studies and Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Film. I welcome applications from postgraduate students in any of these areas.
Research projects
In 2019 (with support from the Global Challenges Research Fund) I established the UK’s first research collaboration with the world-leading Antioquia Neuroscience Group (GNA) in Colombia. I brought together a multi-centre (GNA, Aston University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Columbia University) and interdisciplinary team (neurologists, psychologists, speech therapists, humanities scholars) to design and deliver research into the use of creative narratives to support the mental health and wellbeing of people with dementia and their families.
COVID-19 obliged us to adapt our in-person methodologies to virtual delivery, turning our original 10-week pilot study into an 8-month creativity and community lifeline for our participants and their families. On the basis of this success, we are now running a full feasibility and effectiveness study of the online provision of psychosocial interventions for people with dementia in Latin America, with future extension into the UK
Research collaborations
My Proyecto Narrativas brought together Neurologists, Psychologists, Speech & Art Therapists, Social Workers and Medical Humanities scholars from the University of Antioquia, Aston University and Columbia University.
Research interests
My main research interests are in the fields of Medical Humanities, Dementia Studies and Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Film. I welcome applications from postgraduate students in any of these areas.
Research projects
In 2019 (with support from the Global Challenges Research Fund) I established the UK’s first research collaboration with the world-leading Antioquia Neuroscience Group (GNA) in Colombia. I brought together a multi-centre (GNA, Aston University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Columbia University) and interdisciplinary team (neurologists, psychologists, speech therapists, humanities scholars) to design and deliver research into the use of creative narratives to support the mental health and wellbeing of people with dementia and their families.
COVID-19 obliged us to adapt our in-person methodologies to virtual delivery, turning our original 10-week pilot study into an 8-month creativity and community lifeline for our participants and their families. On the basis of this success, we are now running a full feasibility and effectiveness study of the online provision of psychosocial interventions for people with dementia in Latin America, with future extension into the UK
Research collaborations
My Proyecto Narrativas brought together Neurologists, Psychologists, Speech & Art Therapists, Social Workers and Medical Humanities scholars from the University of Antioquia, Aston University and Columbia University.
Supervision
Postgraduate research supervision
I was the principal supervisor of a doctoral candidate investigating criminological theories in Chilean detective novels from the 1960s to the 1990s. The candidate was awarded her PhD with no corrections required in December 2019.
I welcome approaches from PG students in the fields of Medical Humanities, Dementia Studies and Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Film.
Teaching
I have designed and delivered more than 20 UG and PG modules in Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies and Translation.
Publications
A World Among these Islands: Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America, by Roberto Márquez (reviewed by Peter Hulme) Caribbean Reasonings: The Thought of New World, The Quest for Decolonisation, edited by Brian Meeks & Norman Girvan (reviewed by Cary Fraser) Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, by Paul B. Miller (reviewed by Kerstin Oloff) Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze, by Maria Cristina Fumagalli (reviewed by Maureen Shay) Who Abolished Slavery: Slave Revolts and Abolitionism: A Debate with João Pedro Marques, edited by Seymour Drescher & Pieter C. Emmer, and Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R . Peterson (reviewed by Claudius Fergus) The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery, by Gustav Ungerer (reviewed by James Walvin) Children in Slavery through the Ages, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers & Joseph C. Miller (reviewed by Indrani Chatterjee) The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, by Peter T. Leeson (reviewed by Kris Lane) Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah, by Keith Sandiford (reviewed by Elaine Savory) Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul, edited by Jennifer Rahim & Barbara Lalla (reviewed by Supriya M. Nair) Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature, by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (reviewed by Lyndon K. Gill) Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, by Kaiama L. Glover (reviewed by Asselin Charles) Divergent Dictions: Contemporary Dominican Literature, by Néstor E. Rodríguez (reviewed by Dawn F. Stinchcomb) The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, edited by Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt & Emma Smith (reviewed by Leah Rosenberg) Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba, by Todd Ramón Ochoa (reviewed by Brian Brazeal) El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader, by Araceli Tinajero (reviewed by Juan José Baldrich) Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959, by Gillian McGillivray (reviewed by Consuelo Naranjo Orovio) The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i, by Christine Skwiot (reviewed by Amalia L. Cabezas) A History of the Cuban Revolution, by Aviva Chomsky (reviewed by Michelle Chase) The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, by Todd F. Tietchen (reviewed by Stephen Fay) The Devil in the Details: Cuban Antislavery Narrative in the Postmodern Age, by Claudette M. Williams (reviewed by Gera Burton) Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance during the Cold War, by Hector Amaya (reviewed by Ann Marie Stock) Perceptions of Cuba: Canadian and American Policies in Comparative Perspective, by Lana Wylie (reviewed by Julia Sagebien) Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, by Frank Andre Guridy (reviewed by Susan Greenbaum) The Irish in the Atlantic World, edited by David T. Gleeson (reviewed by Donald Harman Akenson) The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Walton Look Lai & Tan Chee-Beng (reviewed by John Kuo Wei Tchen) The Island of One People: An Account of the History of the Jews of Jamaica, by Marilyn Delevante & Anthony Alberga (reviewed by Barry Stiefel) Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname, by Wieke Vink (reviewed by Aviva Ben-Ur) Only West Indians: Creole Nationalism in the British West Indies, by F.S.J. Ledgister (reviewed by Jerome Teelucksingh) Cultural DNA: Gender at the Root of Everyday Life in Rural Jamaica, by Diana J. Fox (reviewed by Jean Besson) Women in Grenadian History, 1783-1983, by Nicole Laurine Phillip (reviewed by Bernard Moitt) British-Controlled Trinidad and Venezuela: A History of Economic Interests and Subversions, 1830-1962, by Kelvin Singh (reviewed by Stephen G. Rabe) Export/Import Trends and Economic Development in Trinidad, 1919-1939, by Doddridge H.N. Alleyne (reviewed by Rita Pemberton) Post-Colonial Trinidad: An Ethnographic Journal, by Colin Clarke & Gillian Clarke (reviewed by Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy) Poverty in Haiti: Essays on Underdevelopment and Post Disaster Prospects, by Mats Lundahl (reviewed by Robert Fatton Jr.) From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964, by Millery Polyné (reviewed by Brenda Gayle Plummer) Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010, edited by Martin Munro (reviewed by Jonna Knappenberger) Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, by Margarita A. Mooney (reviewed by Rose-Marie Chierici) This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto, by Carol B. Duncan (reviewed by James Houk) Interroger les morts: Essai sur le dynamique politique des Noirs marrons ndjuka du Surinam et de la Guyane, by Jean-Yves Parris (reviewed by H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen & W. van Wetering)
Since its first implementation in 1998, evidence has been presented of the positive impact of the TimeSlips storytelling method for people with dementia in long-term care (LTC) settings. This paper extends this evidence in important new directions: it is the longest TimeSlips study to date and the first to evaluate the feasibility of online delivery of the method (in response to COVID-19 quarantine) and the impact of this on the personhood, quality of life and psychological well-being of Spanish-speaking participants in non-LTC settings in the Global South. Trained facilitators provided weekly, one-hour TimeSlips sessions via Zoom over 32 consecutive weeks to eight participants with dementia. Semi-structured interviews of participants and care partners were conducted within one week of the final intervention. Thematic analysis evaluated the resultant qualitative data. This online implementation of the TimeSlips creative expression (CE) method reinforced key facets of participants' personhood (self-expression and self-perception, which led in turn to increased care partner appreciation), had a positive impact on key domains of quality of life (mood, energy levels and cognitive function) and stimulated a key aspect of psychological well-being (the formation and maintenance of social ties). The online delivery of the TimeSlips method to participants who remain in their own homes is feasible and effective. Future research should compare the benefits of online versus face-to-face delivery of this CE method.
This article has common Cuban motifs at its core: the prevalent obsession with the notion of collective identity, the ideological and psychological importance of national anniversaries, and the omnipresence of the archetypal patriot Jose Marti. It approaches all from a particular theoretical perspective, however, and thus presents a new reading of the so-called ideario martiano and of the Cuban "national narrative" at a critical moment of the island's historical trajectory: 1953, the centenary of Marti's birth. Taking its lead from cultural anthropology (and particularly from the work of Victor Turner), this article presents the half-century since independence in 1902 as a post-colonial "rite of passage" punctuated by a series of turning points, or "limens," within which the sense of national identity was exposed to sustained scrutiny by public intellectuals and activists. The article provides evidence of such intense collective introspection in 1953 when commemorations of Marti's centenary stimulated a reexamination of the Republic in the light of his luminous example. Importantly, this turning point is also exposed as a battleground on which antagonistic interpretations of martiano heroism, Republican history, and national identity faced each other in exegetical strife.
The Cuban revolution drastically altered the country's socio-cultural calibration and from 1959 pleasure-seeking tourists made way for intellectual travellers keen to contribute to the revolutionary process. Jean-Paul Sartre arrived on the island in 1960, Allen Ginsberg followed in 1965; their experiences and observations couldn't have been more different. Although explanation for this discrepancy could be sought in the ideological idiosyncrasies of the two writers, this essay argues that the island visited was not the same. Using a liminal ontology inherited from anthropology to explore the Cuban revolution as a rite of national passage, this essay hopes to illuminate some of the key contours of the island's shifting socio-cultural topography over five critical years of consolidation. Through the lenses offered by these two travelling writers, internal and external forces appear to propel revolutionary Cuba beyond a liminal period of archipelagic flux towards a more determinedly insular and strictly structured archetype by the mid-1960s.
This book offers an innovative and provocative analysis of the much-studied Cuban Revolution by reminding us that Fidel Castro's was actually the second of the island's twentieth-century revolutions. By bringing 1959 into criticalcommunication with the revolution of 1933, the book explores Cuba's trajectory from colony to republic to revolution, not as a linear inevitability, but as a rite of collective passage punctuated by turning points in which publicdebate turned to almost obsessive reflection on national 'identity' and national 'destiny'. In re-reading important works of many of Cuba's most significant intellectual and political figures, whilst also revealing little known but truly transcendental contributions to the collective narrative during both revolutionary periods, this book makes a major contribution to a more complex, nuanced and sophisticated understanding of Cuban cultural history and Cuban national identity in the twentieth century. In both periods, the book reveals revolutionary zeal challenged by dogged ambivalence, nihilism undercut by remembrance, the teleological pursuit of 'The End' of the national narrative displaced by 'An End', always and forever 'to be continued'.
Explores the idiom-identity complex in Cuba in the first three decades of the twentieth century, concentrating on an emblematic catalog of the idiomatic raw material of the Cuban language community: Fernando Ortiz's vernacular dictionary, 'Un Catauro de cubanismos' from 1923. Author considers the critical complex of history, geography, and identity within Ortiz's dictionary. Language and identity are irrevocably enmeshed. From within the infinitely complex quotidian chaos, language articulates, performs, and expresses experience. each moment’s mayhem is tamed by the narrative solace of “beginning,” “middle,” and “end” and it is through the articulation of solitary andegoistic experience that isolated “I” becomes known to, and part of, the collective “We.” For Roy Harris, “language-making is ... the essential process by which men construct a cultural identity for themselves, and for the communities to which they see themselves as belonging” (Harris 1980:Preface). This sense of “language community” inevitably displaces others beyond the borders of collective expression; shared readings of shared experiences are catalysts for community coalescence and narrative self-defense