Contact & Members

Lucy Selman is Professor of Palliative and End of Life Care at the University of Bristol, where she leads the Palliative and End of Life Care Research Group, and the Founding Director of the Good Grief Festival. Her research over the last 20 years has focused on people’s experiences of serious illness, the end of life and bereavement, and how to improve care and support in these domains. Prof Selman excels at uniting others behind a shared vision and collaborating with non-academic partners and diverse communities to improve experiences and reduce inequities at the end of life and in bereavement.

Lesel Dawson is Associate Professor of Literature and Culture at the University of Bristol and the Co-Director of the Good Grief Festival. Her academic research explores grief, literature and the history of the emotions and she is currently writing a book on creativity and grief. Her work includes co-producing two short films on children, grief and creativity; partnering with charities on an article on mandatory grief education; collaborating on an illustrated booklet on grief and baby loss; writing the screenplay for a fiction film about disenfranchised grief; and working with theatre company Crowded Room on an audio story.

David Kessler is an Honorary Fellow in Grief Research and Engagement at the University of Bristol. He is an internationally recognised grief expert, writer and public speaker, with decades of work supporting bereaved people and his own personal experiences of loss. He is the author of six books, including Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief and On Grief and Grieving (co-written with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross). David’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Business Week, and Life Magazine, and on CNN, Fox, NBC, PBS, and CBS. For more about David, visit his website, grief.com

Anne Ismay’s research is concerned with end-of-life care in fiction, photography, poetry and film related to HIV/AIDS, with a focus on domestic space. She also works more broadly on literary and creative responses to grief and bereavement from the medieval to the present day, and has developed and taught undergraduate units on The Art of Grief, and Representing HIV/AIDS.

Jenny Birchall is a Senior Research Associate at Bristol Medical School. She is a qualitative researcher, most recently working on a project about equitable bereavement care for ethnically diverse communities. She is part of the Good Grief Festival and Grief Centre team. 

Andrew Blades is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. He researches several areas relating to grief, having published on the literature and culture of the AIDS epidemic, and he is currently working on a project about hoarding. 

American expatriate Carrie Etter has published five collections of poetry, most recently Grief’s Alphabet (Seren, April 2024), described by The Guardian as ‘an impassioned reckoning with the aftermath of Etter’s adoptive parents’ deaths.’

Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals and anthologies internationally. She also writes essays, fiction, and reviews, and she is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol.

Lizzie Gourd is an early-career researcher and Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature at the University of Bristol. Her areas of interest include grief and trauma studies, the reception of Greek tragedy, and life writing. She recently published an article in The London Magazine on post-pandemic grief and Mrs Dalloway, and is currently preparing a monograph on grief, illness, and classical narratives in Virginia Woolf. 

Rachel Hare has collaborated on a number of creative and academic grief-related projects, including an article and policy paper on grief education; zines to accompany the aerial comedy The Guy in the Luggage Rack; short films on children, grief and creativity; and an illustrated booklet on grief and baby loss. She is part of the Good Grief Festival and Grief Centre team.

Jimmy Hay is a filmmaking researcher and the Head of Subject for Film and Television at Bristol. His work explores cinematic portrayals of grief, and the potential for film to convey the lived experience of grieving.

Ed Kirton-Darling is a Senior Lecturer in the University of Bristol Law School and a qualified solicitor (non-practising). His 2022 monograph Death, Family and the Law: The Contemporary Inquest in Context is published by Bristol University Press and draws on empirical, historical and conceptual research to examine the contemporary inquest, kinship and accountability, exploring how the role of a grieving family is understood, who family is perceived to be (and whose grief is not legitimate for the purposes of playing a role in the inquest), and the ways in which their participation shapes investigation into a death. He has a particular interest in the intersection of investigations into death and social welfare and housing law, and the role of the Coroner in this context.

Dominic Lam is a researcher in transnational English Literature at the University of Bristol. His PhD thesis explores depictions of grief across Hong Kong and Việt Nam in memoir, fiction, poetry and film. He is interested in how the loss of loved ones and places interlock, and the role of queerness in grieving.

Ulrika Maude is a Professor of Modern Literature at the Department of English and Director of the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science at the University of Bristol. Her work explores embodiment, sensory studies, medicine, and the intersections of grief, aesthetics and affect in literature and culture. Her books include Beckett, Technology and the Body, The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (co-edited with David Hillman), and Samuel Beckett and Medicine.

Chloe Shaw is a Senior Research Associate at the Bristol Medical School. She is a social scientist, specialising in the method of Conversation Analysis, which she has used to study healthcare communication towards the end of life. She is part of the Grief Centre Team.

Gina Walter is a researcher in early modern English Literature. Her recently completed PhD thesis focusses on death and grief in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and the ways that characters and audiences confront mortality through different objects. She has worked on the Good Grief Festival and on various qualitative research projects examining the impact of creativity (storytelling, theatre-making, singing) on experiences of grief.