Jo Winning is Professor of Modern Literature & Critical Theory, and Head of the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, in the Faculty of Arts at Monash. She has published widely on twentieth- and twenty-first literatures, cultures, theory and practice, with particular focus on modernisms and the Avant Garde, literature and identity, theories of gender and sexuality, lesbian subjectivities and cultural production, and psychoanalysis and its theories. She also works in the field of medical humanities, examining the relations between illness, language and patient subjectivity, and the interface between critical theory in the humanities and clinical practice in medicine. She has worked extensively with clinical and medical education colleagues to theorise the relationship between the humanities disciplines, medical education and clinical practice, developing an applied medical humanities approach that has resulted in multiple publications and unique co-designed research-led medical humanities courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

In the medical humanities field, she is currently working on the monograph The Psychic Life of Medicine, which focuses on illness, language, subjectivity and the clinical encounter. The project seeks to understand the psychodynamic processes that underpin the lived experiences of pain and illness, from patient and clinical perspectives. It aims to theorise these realms of experience in new and productive ways. Taking Michael Balint's notion that in the clinical encounter there is a 'confusion of tongues' between clinician and patient as a starting point, it asks how these two subjectivities – of clinician and patient - are constituted. It looks to psychoanalytic frameworks to help understand these, and to probe the space that exists between them. Since the clinical encounter requires some kind of communication, the book focuses on language, specifically the different languages of clinician and patient. If Elaine Scarry is right that pain 'destroys language' (and this remains to be debated) what other forms of communication - for example poetry, art, photography, music, sound - might prove productive for the communication of pain and illness? In addition to regarding both pathography and the poetics of illness, the book looks to examples from contemporary art practice, music and film soundtrack to consider communication in the clinical encounter. Taking an applied medical humanities approach, the book straddles the very different disciplinary fields of biomedical science, clinical practice, the arts, and humanities disciplines.

She is also working on the project ‘Towards Radical Vulnerability’, that sits at the intersections of medical humanities, social justice work and political activism. The project explores the ways in which the lived experience of illness and its embodiment provide us with conceptual tools to challenge the dominant socio-cultural ideologies of invulnerability that drive racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and climate change denial.

In the field of modernist critical studies, she is CI on the AHRC-funded Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions project, and along with Scott McCracken, Adam Guy and Bryony Randall is producing a new critical edition of Richardson’s 13-volume modernist life-work Pilgrimage, and the first full collection of Richardson’s extensive epistolary materials, all published with Oxford University Press. In addition to bringing Pilgrimage back into print, scaffolded by detailed critical annotations, this project has also yielded multiple publications about modernist archival research, the relationship between modernist literature and letters, and the significant afterlives of modernism in experimental women’s experimental writing and artistic practices of the later twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Together with Scott McCracken she is currently editing the fifth volume of the series, the novels Honeycomb and The Tunnel, and the first volume of Richardson’s Letters.

She is a passionate advocate for the HASS disciplines, sitting on the British Academy’s Strategic Forum for the Humanities (2021-2024), and the Executive Committee of the Australian Heads of University English (AUHE). She is Vice-President of the Association for Medical and Healthcare Humanities. Prior to joining Monash in 2023, she was Professor of Modern Literature and Critical Theory in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. At Birkbeck she was Assistant Dean for Equalities, (2017-21) and College Dean (2021-23). Between 2011 and 2023, she was Lay-Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Exams Sub-Committee, and she sat on the Academy of Royal Medical Colleges Working Party on unconscious bias in College Membership examinations. She has built collaborative medical humanities partnerships with various medical schools, including Imperial College, London and St George’s, University of London.