Leigh Dale
Leigh Dale is an independent scholar whose research interests include higher education, particularly the history of teaching English literature in universities; the representation of self harm (in the book "Responses to Self Harm" published by McFarland); and Australian Literature, especially the writing of Thea Astley, Christos Tsiolkas, and Katharine Susannah Prichard; and postcolonial writing and history, notably the life and career of Governor George Grey in Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and South Africa. Since 2017 she has been a judge of the Colin Roderick Award for the best book published in Australia, and in 2019 is chair of the judging panel.
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Books by Leigh Dale
When the American Psychiatric Association (APA) released the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in May 2013, it included for the first time what it termed “non-suicidal self injury” (NSSI). Self harm is generally regarded as a modern phenomenon, one associated especially with young women. But references to self harm are found in the poetry of ancient Rome, the drama of ancient Greece and early Christian texts, including the Bible, as well as twentieth-century literature and film. Academic interest in self harm has waxed and waned over the last two centuries; these fluctuations tell us a great deal about the ways in which competing and cognate disciplines across medicine, the social sciences and the humanities contend for authority.
Studied by criminologists, doctors, nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists, the actions of those who harm themselves are often represented as alienating and bewildering. At the same time, the narrative habits and research paradigms of fields as diverse as psychology, sociology, teen fiction and studies in religion have sought to naturalise self harm as a meaningful ritual practice. Amidst this diversity and complexity, this book provides a historical and conceptual roadmap for understanding self harm across a range of times and places. It aims at helping researchers and practitioners who encounter or want to contribute to research in self to understand other kinds of approaches, whether these be in modern high schools or in modern warfare; in traditional religious practices or in avant-garde performance art. Describing the diversity of self harm as well as responses to it, this book challenges the dominant view that self harm is a single behavior that can be explained through association with a specific age group, gender, cultural identity or traumatic experience.
Papers by Leigh Dale
When the American Psychiatric Association (APA) released the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in May 2013, it included for the first time what it termed “non-suicidal self injury” (NSSI). Self harm is generally regarded as a modern phenomenon, one associated especially with young women. But references to self harm are found in the poetry of ancient Rome, the drama of ancient Greece and early Christian texts, including the Bible, as well as twentieth-century literature and film. Academic interest in self harm has waxed and waned over the last two centuries; these fluctuations tell us a great deal about the ways in which competing and cognate disciplines across medicine, the social sciences and the humanities contend for authority.
Studied by criminologists, doctors, nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists, the actions of those who harm themselves are often represented as alienating and bewildering. At the same time, the narrative habits and research paradigms of fields as diverse as psychology, sociology, teen fiction and studies in religion have sought to naturalise self harm as a meaningful ritual practice. Amidst this diversity and complexity, this book provides a historical and conceptual roadmap for understanding self harm across a range of times and places. It aims at helping researchers and practitioners who encounter or want to contribute to research in self to understand other kinds of approaches, whether these be in modern high schools or in modern warfare; in traditional religious practices or in avant-garde performance art. Describing the diversity of self harm as well as responses to it, this book challenges the dominant view that self harm is a single behavior that can be explained through association with a specific age group, gender, cultural identity or traumatic experience.