Keywords for Health Humanities

Friday plenary session of the 2020 International Health Humanities Consortium: Politics of Health Conference, featuring:

Rachel Adams

“Care”

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Jay Baruch

“Creativity”

Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Scholarly Concentration, Alpert Medical School at Brown University

Deirdre Cooper Owens

“Sex”

Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of Humanities in Medicine, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Benjamin Reiss

“Sleep”

Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and Chair of the English Department, Emory University

Ralph Savarese

“Neurodiversity”

Professor of English, Grinnell College

Jane Thrailkill

“Empathy”

Bank of America Honors Term Associate Professor of English, Director for Literature, Medicine, and Culture, and Founding Director for HHIVE

Sari Altschuler

Chair/Moderator

Associate Professor of English and Founder of Health, Humanities, and Society, Northeastern University

Friday, March 27, 2020

8:30am – 10:00am | Community Room Central Library

The health humanities is at once a vibrant, expansive, and exponentially growing field, and one in great need of a conceptual vocabulary to organize its energies. This Keywords for Health Humanities plenary features six leading thinkers in the field who will offer brief thoughts about the keywords care, empathy, sleep, sex, neurodiversity, and creativity toward the goal of establishing a shared critical lexicon. From motivating principles of the field (empathy and care) and tools for practitioners (creativity) to structural concerns (neurodiversity and sex) and vital research topics (sleep), these words represent a range of pressing issues currently animating the field.

A lively moderated conversation about the role of such words in organizing the health humanities across disciplines will follow.

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Sponsored by the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, Jean & Alexander Heard Libraries, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, The Curb Center, Vanderbilt University College of Arts and Science, Center for Latin American Studies, Department of Sociology, American Studies, Dean Bonnie J. Dow, Dean of Academic Initiative, Vanderbilt School of Medicine, the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Stanford Medicine: Medicine & the Muse Center for Biomedical Ethics, Hiram College: Center for Literature and Medicine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, HHIVE, Columbia University Medical Center: Program in Narrative Medicine, Center for Bioethics and Humanities: University of Colorado Center Anschutz Medical Campus, Duke University Health Humanities Lab, Northeast Ohio Medical University, Program for Humanities in Medicine: Yale University School of Medicine, McGovern Center for Humanities & Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), and University of Utah Health.