Professor Paul Crawford holds a personal chair in Health Humanities at the School of Nursing,
Midwifery and Physiotherapy at the University of Nottingham. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts,
Senior Fellow of the Institute of Mental Health and Visiting Professor of Health Communication at both the
Medical Faculty, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, and the University of Technology, Sydney,
Australia. He is Co-Founder (with Professor Ron Carter) and chair of the Health Language Research
Group at the University of Nottingham, bringing together academics and clinicians to advance applied
linguistics in health care settings. He has been appointed to the editorial board of Communication &
Medicine and acts as a referee for Sociology of Health & Illness, TEXT: an interdisciplinary journal for the
study of discourse, Journal of Applied Linguistics, Communication & Medicine, Mosaic: a journal for the
interdisciplinary study of literature, Open University Press, Sage Publications and Nelson Thornes. In
2008 he was awarded a Lord Dearing Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.
Crawford’s scholarship in the core areas of literature, linguistics, mental health and the philosophy
of research has gained attention at national and international levels, particularly in Canada, North America,
Europe and Australia. He has originated and led interdisciplinary, innovative projects that advance
multimodal and pragmatic approaches to health language study and health humanities generally. In June
2007, he won hosting for the internationally popular Interdisciplinary Conference on Communication,
Medicine and Ethics (COMET) which will be held at The University of Nottingham in 2011. More recently
he addressed the first ESRC Business Seminar: Knowledge Transfer from Medical Professionals to Industry
at Biocity, Nottingham.
Crawford has consulted for a number of governmental and professional bodies, most recently
contributing to the Chief Nursing Officer’s Review of Mental Health Nursing (Department of Health,
2006), building on the work of his Brief, Ordinary and Effective (BOE) Model of Health Communication
(Crawford et al 2006). He has previously acted as an advisor on Child and Adolescent Mental Health to
Malcolm Rae, Nursing Officer (Department of Health) and consulted for West Midlands NHSE, RCN West
Midlands Region, RCN London.
Crawford leads communication skills training and mental health (Derby Centre) at the UK’s
biggest School of Nursing and continues to work closely with NHS Healthcare Trusts in a number of
professional communication and knowledge transfer initiatives, not least as Academic Lead for the
Managed Innovation Network in Mental Health Communication, funded by Nottinghamshire Healthcare
NHS Trust and Co-Founder and Course Tutor for a new distance learning MA in Health Communication
aimed at busy health professionals.
Crawford has held grants from prestigious Research Councils (The British Academy, ESRC and
The Leverhulme Trust), consulted on research methodologies for both the ESRC and AHRC and currently
supervises 8 PhD students (2 ESRC funded) in studies of language use in health care. He has delivered
keynote and plenary lectures at international conferences and written 43 peer reviewed journal papers, 10
book chapters and 7 books, including: Communicating Care (Nelson Thornes, 1998); Nothing Purple,
Nothing Black (The Book Guild, 2002); Politics and History in William Golding (University of Missouri,
2003); Evidence Based Research (Open University Press, 2003), which was Highly Commended in the
BMA Book Competition for 2004; Storytelling in Therapy (Nelson Thornes, 2004); Evidence Based Health
Communication (Open University Press, 2006); Communication in Clinical Settings (Nelson Thornes,
2006). He has been commissioned to write Literature and Madness: Post-war British and American Fiction
(Palgrave, London). Crawford’s major, critical work on the novelist William Golding was reviewed in the
TLS and led to a reprinted chapter in the prestigious Bloom’s Guides (Lord of the Flies, Chelsea House,
2004; 2008) and a commissioned entry on Golding in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (OUP,
2006). Crawford has written papers on the ‘mad poet’ John Clare and nurse-writer Mary Seacole. He has
also written articles for The Guardian and various regional newspapers. His acclaimed novel about mental
illness, Nothing Purple, Nothing Black, resulted in various interviews in national media and an option for
film by the British film producer, Jack Emery (The Drama House, London/ Florida). His second novel,
Hair of the Dog, is represented by Bell, Lomax & Moreton, London.