Meet the Network

Below is a list of the applicants who were part of the initial bid for the IDR Network+ grant. Please read on to find out ore about the diverse range of research interests that make up our wonderful network.


Lead: 

Prof. Dr. Matthew Broome BSc (Hons) MBChB (Hons) PGCAP PhD PhD FRCPsych is Chair in Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health, Director of the Institute for Mental Health and Director of The Midlands Translational Centre, Mental Health Mission at the University of Birmingham; Distinguished Research Fellow, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford; and Visiting Professor, Suor Orsola Benicasa University of Naples. 

In the NHS, Matthew is Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist to East Birmingham Early Intervention in Psychosis Team, Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.

Matthew studied Pharmacology and Medicine at the University of Birmingham and trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, Bethlem Royal Hospital, and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.  Matthew has a PhD in Psychiatry from the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London and in Philosophy from the University of Warwick.  He is series editor for the Oxford University Press series, International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry.

Matthew’s research interests include youth mental health, the prodromal phase of psychosis, delusion formation, mood instability, interdisciplinary methods, mental health humanities, phenomenology, and the philosophy and ethics of psychiatry. His research is funded by the Wellcome Trust, NIH, MRC, NIHR, EU and the Wolfson Foundation.

Recent important publications:

  • Spencer, L., Broome, M.R. and Stanghellini, G., 2024. The future of phenomenological psychopathology. Philosophical Psychology, pp.1-16.
  • Broeker, M.D. and Broome, M.R., 2024. “Minimal self” locked into a model: exploring the prospect of formalizing intentionality in schizophrenia. Philosophical Psychology, pp.1-22.
  • Broome, M.R., 2024. Phenomenology, delusions and justice. World Psychiatry, 23(2), p.239.
  • Broome, M.R., Rodrigues, J., Ritunnano, R. and Humpston, C., 2024. Psychiatry as a vocation: Moral injury, COVID-19, and the phenomenology of clinical practice. Clinical Ethics, 19(2), pp.157-170.
  • Spencer, L. and Broome, M., 2023. The epistemic harms of empathy in phenomenological psychopathology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, pp.1-22.
  • McConnell, D., Broome, M. and Savulescu, J., 2023. Making psychiatry moral again: the role of psychiatry in patient moral development. Journal of Medical Ethics, 49(6), pp.423-427.
  • Broeker, M.D. and Broome, M.R., 2023. Can an algorithm become delusional? Evaluating ontological commitments and methodology of computational psychiatry. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, pp.1-27.
  • Ritunnano, R., Papola, D., Broome, M.R. and Nelson, B., 2023. Phenomenology as a resource for translational research in mental health: methodological trends, challenges and new directions. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, 32, pp.e5-e5.


Co-Lead:

Dr. Francesca Brencio is a philosopher interested in the integration of phenomenology and hermeneutics within clinical education and practice. She joined the University of Birmingham in August 2024 as Teaching Fellow in Mental Health with a full-time teaching position. Francesca is also the Director of the PhenoLab - A Theoretical Laboratory in Phenomenology and Mental Health, officially recognised in 2024 as an Organisational Partner at The Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care at the St Catherine's College at the University of Oxford (UK).

Francesca studied Philosophy at University of Perugia (Italy), Theology at the Theological Institute in Assisi associated to Pontificia Universitas Lateranensis (Vatican City) and awarded a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Human Sciences from the University of Perugia (Italy). She was a post-doctoral researcher at the Western Sydney University (Australia) and visiting post-doc at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Germany). From 2018 to 2024 she was Associate Researcher in Philosophy at the Research Group “HUM018: Filosofía Aplicada: Sujeto, Sufrimiento, Sociedad” at the University of Seville (Spain).

Executive Committee Member of The Royal College of Psychiatrists Special Interest Group in Philosophy, since 2018 she actively collaborates with The Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice at St. Catherine's College at the University of Oxford (UK). Since January 2022 she is a member of the Philosophy of Psychiatry Educators Network as part of the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry.

In March 2021 she received The Seal of Excellence, awarded by the European Commission in the frame of EU Programme for Research and Innovation 2014-2020. 

From September 2023 to July 2024 she was among the leading researchers of Co-production Scheme on OCD, entitled “Stuck on the puzzle. A philosophical inquiry on OCD”, as part of the broad international project entitled Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology, funded by Wellcome Trust Grant at the University of Birmingham (UK), led by Prof. Matthew Broome.

Scholar in the phenomenological and Heideggerian tradition, Francesca’s scholarly focus lies at the intersection of phenomenological psychopathology and psychiatry. Her investigations encompass fundamental aspects of human experience, including perceptual processes, attentional mechanisms, emotions (individual and social emotions), affective life, and the role of the body in psychopathological experiences. 


Co-applicants:


Prof. Dr. Lisa Bortolotti is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham (UK) and the University of Ferrara (Italy). Her interests are in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences and she investigates how belief, rationality, agency, and mental health interact with each other. Lisa is the editor of Epistemic Justice in Mental Healthcare (Springer 2025) and the author of Why Delusions Matter (Bloomsbury 2023). She is also the Editor in Chief of Philosophical Psychology.

Webpage: Professor Lisa Bortolotti - Department of Philosophy - University of Birmingham


Dr Chris Wagstaff is an Associate Professor in mental health nursing at the University of Birmingham. He worked for the NHS for 14 years before entering Higher Education. He is a clinical nurse specialist in mental health and brings this experience to his role. Chris is the Head of Global Student Mobility in the College of Medicine and Health. Chris helped develop and launch the first programme for mental health nursing in Guyana, at the University of Guyana.

Chris’ first degree was a BA in Philosophy and his PhD was an interpretative study looking at disengagement from mental health services. Chris currently has five PhD students, who are from a variety of healthcare backgrounds. His research is usually qualitative or mixed methods in nature and he frequently collaborates with colleagues in Brazil. Chris is an active member of the Risk, Abuse & Violence (RAV) research programme. His particular area of research interest is the impact of substance use on vulnerable populations; that said his five most successful papers are:

  • The accordion and the deep bowl of spaghetti: Eight researchers' experiences of using IPA as a methodology.
  • Specific design features of an interpretative phenomenological analysis study.
  • The State of Qualitative Research in Health and Social Science Literature: A Focused Mapping Review and Synthesis
  • Brazilian nurses’ concept of religion, religiosity, and spirituality: a qualitative descriptive study.
  • The experiences of mental health services for ‘black’ men with schizophrenia and a history of disengagement: a qualitative study.

He currently has two studies underway, one looking at suicide among Brazilian high school students and the other evaluating substance use and depression in the Quilombola communities, a population that is socially excluded and has low social determinants of health.

Webpage: Dr Christopher Wagstaff - School of Nursing and Midwifery - University of Birmingham 


Prof. Dr. Muireann Quigley is Professor of Law, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Birmingham and is Principal Investigator on the Wellcome Trust funded Everyday Cyborgs 2.0 project.  Although she now works in a law school, in a previous life she was a medical doctor She conducts interdisciplinary background which crosses medicine, ethics, and law. Her research, as part of the Everyday Cyborgs 2.0 project, focuses on the legal and philosophical challenges arising from the joining of persons and bodies with attached and implanted medical devices. She is the author of Self-ownership, Property Rights, and the Human Body: A Legal and Philosophical Analysis, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is also interested in medicines regulation and is co-lead, with Matt Hayler, on ‘Psychedelics and Regulatory Decision-making: A Scoping Project’ funded by the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Birmingham. Along with Matt, she is author of the forthcoming chapter ‘A Psychedelic Research Agenda? The Quest for Therapeutic and Legal Legitimacy’. Muireann is a member of the Interim Devices Working Group which provides independent, external expert input and advice relating to medical devices to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.


Dr. Yue Feng is an assistant professor at the School of Computer Science of University of Birmingham. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at University College London (UCL). She also spent wonderful time doing research at Amazon, ByteDance, and Baidu.

Her research interests lie in natural language processing and information retrieval. Her recent work can be broadly categorized into the following directions:

（1）Large Language Model Powered AI Agents

（2）Factualness, Faithfulness, and Trustworthiness of Large Language Models

（3）Multimodal Foundation Models

Website: https://fengyue-leah.github.io/


Dr. Deanne Bell is Associate Professor in Race, Education and Social Justice. She is a critical psychologist whose decolonial research critiques race and epistemic injustice. Deanne’s work draws from the fields of critical psychology, decolonial theory and praxis, psychosocial theory, and critical education to interrogate problems with race, coloniality and epistemic injustice. Her commitment to social transformation is animated in her scholarship and practice of critical pedagogy and participatory research with historically marginalised communities. She seeks to contribute to epistemic justice in higher education and society. Her work is influenced by the Black-Archipelago anticolonial tradition and the writings of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant and Paulo Freire.

Key Publications:

  • Bell D. (2025, Forthcoming). Race Versus the Human. American Psychologist.
  • Bell, D. (2024). A Black-Archipelago Anticolonial Canon Speaks Psychology. Review of General Psychology. 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/10892680241289346
  • Bell, D. (2022). Occupy the classroom radically. Third World Quarterly. 43:8, 2063-2074, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2022.2074828
  • Bell, D. (2018). A pedagogical response to decoloniality: Decolonial atmospheres and rising subjectivity. American Journal of Community Psychology 62(3-4). DOI: 10.1002/ajcp.12292
  • Bell, D. (2018). The indifferent. Qualitative Research in Psychology, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2018.1429841.
  • Bell, D. (2016). Retrieving psychosocial signs of structural violence in postcolonial Jamaica. Community Psychology in Global Perspective. Vol 1(2), 144-126.

Webpage: Dr Deanne Bell - School of Education - University of Birmingham


Prof. Dr. Jeanette Littlemore is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham. She is Chair of the International Organisation for Researching and Applying Metaphor. Her research focuses on the role played by metaphor and metonymy in the sharing of emotional experiences. She also explores the role played by metaphor and metonymy in language learning and cross-cultural communication. She has published 10 books and over 150 articles. Recent books include: Creative Metaphor, Emotion and Evaluation in Conversations about Work (Routledge, 2023, with Turner & Tuck) and The Many Faces of Creativity (CUP, 2023, with Turner).

Webpage: Professor Jeannette Littlemore - Department of Linguistics and Communication - University of Birmingham


Prof. Dr. Mark Lee is a Professor of artificial intelligence in the School of Computer Science. His research interests are focussed on Natural Language Processing. He is specifically interested in Sentiment Analysis of text, the automatic identification and understanding of metaphor and the effects of pragmatic inference in dialogue processing. More recently he has been investigating the extraction of constraints from text to build formal models for reasoning. His research has been funded by the Home Office, RCUK, European Union and various industries. 

Website: www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mgl


Prof. Dr. Lyndsey Stonebridge is a writer, critic, and Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham. She works across traditional disciplines, bringing literary and historical insights to law and political theory. A regular journalist and broadcaster, she is driven by a passionate commitment to public education and the real-world value of the arts and humanities. 

Her writing explores themes of justice, exile, and above all, the political and moral life of the mind. Her previous books include The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg, which won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2014, and Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees which was awarded the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize in 2018.

Webpage: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/english/stonebridge-lyndsey
Personal website: https://lyndseystonebridge.com/
Instagram: @lyndseystonebridge 
Bluesky: ‪@lyndseystonebri.bsky.social‬‬


Dr. Ema Sullivan-Bissett


Dr. Jodie Russell is a research fellow in the Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare (EPIC) project and the Birmingham Network for Phenomenology and Mental Health based in the Institute for Mental Health. She is interested in the ways in which research practices can shape the experience of mental disorder itself, and is currently carrying out a qualitative study into the impact of epistemic injustice on young people with psychosis and their sense of belongingness using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Alongside phenomenological approaches to mental health research, Jodie is interest in enactive models of cognition as a possible route through which we could scientifically integrate the various layers (biological, social and psychological) that disorder is instantiated in. Jodie also employs critical methods in her work (such as feminist theory and critical phenomenology) to consider the ethical and political consequences of our understanding of disorder experiences.

Selected publications:

Bluesky: @jelliedsours.bsky.social


Dr. Kathleen Murphy-Hollies is a postdoctoral research fellow on Project EPIC (Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare) at the University of Birmingham. Kathleen is interested in the social and emotional dimensions of rationality, having worked on confabulation, conspiracy theories, and psychopathologies including delusion. She is currently working on epistemic injustice and how it relates to self-knowledge and metaphorical understandings of delusion. She is also book review editor at Philosophical Psychology. 

Key Publications: 

  • Murphy‐Hollies, K., (2024), The Know‐How of Virtue. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 41(3), pp.530-548.
  • Murphy-Hollies, K., (2022), Self-Regulation and Political Confabulation. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 92, pp.111-128.
  • Bortolotti, L., Malpass, F., Murphy-Hollies, K., Somerville-Large, T., Kapoor, G., Braid, O. (2025). Challenging Stereotypes About Young People Who Hear Voices. In: Bortolotti, L. (eds) Epistemic Justice in Mental Healthcare. Palgrave Macmillan


Dr Amy Daughton

After early study at Cambridge, I completed my doctoral research at Trinity College Dublin, which considered the phenomenology and ethics of Paul Ricoeur for intercultural encounter, in dialogue with theological concepts of analogy.  This framework has remained significant for my ongoing writing, though much of my work since has focused on practical theology, a discipline which takes ‘ordinary’ practices seriously as a constitutive part of theological meaning-making, and prioritises phenomenological approaches in theological research. 

This has formed two major strands to my research.  This first is my established and ongoing work on Paul Ricoeur, whose phenomenological understanding of self, other and institution offers ways to make sense of diverse questions of contemporary life, such as the rise of political populism, diversity within the political community, and the role of religion in public reasoning.  Frequently this work also attends to the question of disciplinary distinctions.

The second strand assesses a constellation of contemporary issues through the lenses of political theology.  That has included work on development theory, relating the work of Catholic Social Thought and the capability approach, and most recently I am beginning to expand that work into phenomenological questions of work, labour and the workplace. 

Key publications:

  • A. Daughton, Anthropologies of Development and Theology: Capability Theory and Catholic Social Thought. In: Séverine Deneulin, Clemens Sedmak (eds.) Integral Human Development. Catholic Social Teaching and the Capability Approach (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023).
  • A. Daughton, Fratelli Tutti and Paul Ricoeur: Neighbor, People, Institution. Journal of Catholic Social Thought. Vol. 19. no. 1 (2022) pp. 71-88
  • A. Daughton, Translation, compromise, forgiveness: Exploring the role of original goodness in an ethics of capability. In: Études Ricoeuriennes / Ricoeur Studies. Vol. 13. no. 2 (2022), pp. 59-78
  • A. Daughton, Politics. In: Christoph Hubenthal (ed.) T&T Clark Handbook to Public Theology (T&T Clark, 2022)
  • A. Daughton, Narrative Practices of Exchange: Europe in the face of Exclusionary Populisms. In: Martin Kirschner (ed.) Re-Narrating Europe: Narrative and Performative (Re-)Constructions of a Europe in Crisis (Nomos-Verlag, 2022)
  • E. Phillips, A. Rowlands, A. Daughton (eds.) Political Theology: A Reader (T&T Clark: 2021)
  • A. Daughton, With and For Others. Developing Ricoeur’s Ethics of Self using Aquinas’s Language of Analogy (Herder: 2016).


Other members of the Network:


Prof. Dr. Femi Oyebode MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPsych, FRCPsych (honorary) studied medicine at the University of Ibadan, graduating with distinction in 1977. He trained as a psychiatrist in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and has been Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Birmingham since 1999. He has published over 225 original papers & 23 book chapters. His books include Mindreadings: literature and psychiatry, Madness at the Theatre, Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind- Textbook of Descriptive Psychopathology 4-7th editions (translated into Arabic, Estonia, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, & Spanish), Psychopathology of Rare and Unusual Syndromes, and Doppelgänger: analysing doubles across antiquity, fiction, psychopathology, and neuroscience. He is a published poet, and his volumes include Wednesday is a Colour, Master of the Leopard Hunt, & Indigo, Camwood and Mahogany Red. He is joint presenter of the BBC Radio 4 Series, Is Psychiatry Working? He was Chief Examiner RCPsych 2002-2005. 

He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2016 and the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (the highest honour of the RCPsych) in 2019. He was a judge of the Hippocrates Poetry Prize in 2015 & of the World Psychiatric Association Jean Delay Prize in 2023. He delivered the Osuntokun Memorial Lecture University of Ibadan in 2009, the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ President’s Lecture in 2021, the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry Lecture in 2022, & the Tow Tiang, Seng Distinguished Lecture, Yeo Boon Kim Mind Centre Singapore in 2024. He has been Visiting Professor at University of Ibadan, University of Kuwait, University of Western Australia, & University of Auckland.

Webpage: Professor Oluwafemi (Femi) Oyebode - Institute of Clinical Sciences - University of Birmingham


Dr. Chiara Brozzo, Department of Philosophy

I do research in philosophy of mind and cognitive science (including psychology and psychiatry), empirically-informed philosophy of action, and aesthetics.

My research in philosophy of action is about how we get things done (or fail to do so), and one of the main questions I investigate is: what drives or motivates our actions? I am therefore interested in intentions and in their relationship to motor representations (Brozzo 2017, 2021).

I am very interested in beliefs that are very central to our self-conception. I am exploring how these are acquired and modified through transformative experiences, that is, experiences that teach us something new and also change our self-conception (Paul 2014, 2015; Ullmann-Margalit 2006), but also subtle factors such as habit. I am also exploring the relationship between these beliefs and the notion of existential feeling (Ratcliffe 2015).

I also have research interests in aesthetics, especially the boundary between design and fine arts. I have argued that some perfumes are works of art (Brozzo 2020). Fashion design is my current case study.

Key publications:

  • Brozzo, C. (2017). Motor Intentions: How Intentions and Motor Representations Come Together. Mind & Language, 32(2), 231-256.
  • Brozzo, C. (2020). Are Some Perfumes Works of Art? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 78(1), 21-32.
  • Brozzo, C. (2021). Against the Distinction between Intentions for the Future and Intentions for the Present. American Philosophical Quarterly, 58(4), 333-346.

Webpage: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/philosophy/brozzo-chiara

Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/chiarabrozzo/home 


Dr. Roxana Baiasu is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Mental Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham (UK). Prior to this she taught at the University of Oxford, Stanford University Centre in Oxford, the University of Vienna, University of Leeds, and was a Leverhulme Fellow at Sussex University. 

Her current interests include philosophy of mental health and psychiatry and, more specifically, the phenomenology and ethics of vulnerability, intersectional and relational approaches to mental health, resilience, wellbeing, and justice. 

She has written articles on these topics as well as in the wider areas of phenomenology and existentialism, and feminist philosophy. She is a member of the advisory board of Studia Phaenomenologica. Her recent publications include: “Contextualising Mental Ill Health: An Interdisciplinary Approach” (co-author) in Philosophical Psychology, 2024; "Making Sense of Things in Dementia” in Phenomenology, Neuroscience and Clinical Practice, Francesca Brencio (ed.), Springer, 2024; “Vulnerability, Well Being and Health” in Vulnerability of the Human World, Susi Ferrarello and Élodie Boublil (eds.), Springer, 2023; “The Lived Experience of Lockdown, Illness, Power and Epistemic Injustices” in Time For Debate: Perspectives on Lockdowns from the Humanities and Social Science, Yossi Nehushtan et al. (eds.), Routledge, 2022. She edited (with G. Bird and A.W. Moore) Contemporary Kantian Metaphysics Today: New Essays on Time and Space, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Webpage: Dr Roxana Baiasu - School of Psychology - University of Birmingham


Dr. Rosa Ritunnano, MD, PhD candidate, is a psychiatrist, philosopher and qualitative researcher at the Universities of Birmingham (Institute for Mental Health) and Melbourne (Orygen and Centre for Youth Mental Health). Her interdisciplinary doctoral project ("Delusion and Meaning at the Intersection of Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry) investigates the experiential and meaning-making dimensions of delusions in psychosis from a multiplicity of perspectives, comparing and integrating clinical, phenomenological and narrative methodologies. 

She is an advocate of the transformative potential of phenomenological philosophy for clinical practice, and was awarded the 2021 Wolfe Mays Essay Prize for her essay: “Overcoming Hermeneutical Injustice in Mental Health: A Role for Critical Phenomenology”. She is also interested in the intersection between language and embodiment, the embodiment and neuroscience of emotions, and the relationship between mental health and the emotional ecosystem. 

You can read more about Rosa in The Lancet and you can find a list of key publications here.


Dr. Valeria N. Motta is a philosopher whose work bridges philosophy of science, phenomenology, and the lived human experience. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Birmingham (2021), where her doctoral dissertation delved into the nature of loneliness through a synthesis of interpretative phenomenological analysis and theoretical inquiry into the self and other. Prior to her PhD, Valeria completed an MA (with Distinction) in Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Science at the University of Bristol and studied and taught Philosophy at Universidad de Buenos Aires. 

Valeria’s research interests are currently on the human experience of connection and isolation. She investigates how social isolation shapes individual and collective identities and the role of empathy and shared understanding in fostering meaningful connections. Her studies focus on how people make sense of being together or alone, the experience and discourse around self, intersubjectivity, and belonging, and how these experiences influence our creative acts. Her work explores the interplay between first-person perspective and lived meaning, alongside third-person perspective and second-person experience. She examines how our sense of agency can change in solitude versus loneliness and explores how interactions with technology and nature impact feelings of connection, as well as how they may help or hinder processes of consciousness expansion.  

Currently, Valeria is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Birmingham on the ASPbelong project (2023–2027), a Horizon Europe–funded initiative developing a smartphone-enabled group psychotherapeutic intervention called Augmented Social Play to enhance adolescent mental health and belonging. In this role, she collaborates closely with adolescent co-researchers, employing participatory, arts-based qualitative methods to explore themes of belonging and vulnerability. Valeria plays a key role in coordinating ASPbelong research, co-designing activities with young people to ensure the intervention supports adolescents who may experience marginalization in various contexts.

Selected Publications:


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