Rachel Hindmarsh

Dr Rachel Hindmarsh is an early career researcher at the University of Oxford, who has recently joined Shaping Destiny as a Research Assistant. Rachel's doctoral research was at the intersection of Early Modern French Studies and the Medical Humanities, examining the relation of medicine, time, and fiction in Francois Rabelais's raucous sixteenth-century narratives. This project took an alternative look at medicine in Rabelais's writing, moving away from instrumentalist readings of his fictions as curative or alternative historical sources to argue that early modern literary texts can play a productive role in nuancing critical conversations about the relation of medicine and literature - in the 16th century and beyond. Her new postdoctoral work examines the role of doubt in medical and literary works in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Rachel also teaches French as a Stipendiary Lecturer at St Catherine's College, and works in Outreach at St Hilda's College. Rachel is looking forward to bringing her broader interests in the histories of the body and of imagination, in the collaborative practice of the medical humanities, and in bridging the early modern and the modern, to bear in this Shaping Destiny project.