Members’ Introductions
If you are interested in joining this blog’s conversations and would like to introduce yourself to other MLA scholars who are doing work in literature and medicine or humanities and health (or “medical humanities”), please use the comment feature of this post to do so.
You’re welcome to tell us where you are, what you’ve published, what you are working on, what you hope to work on, and how to contact you.
I’m a physician educator in Chicago with training in Literaturre and Medicine pedagogy and am currrently an adjunct lecturer at the U of I College of Medicine DME and SIU School of Medicine Dept of Medical Humanities. I’ve published a few reflections in the Medicine and the Arts column of Academic Medicine, and am co-author of a chapter in the recently pubished book, “Keeping Reflection Fresh” by KSU Press. Looking forward to a lively conversation here.
Welcome! –Tom Long
Health writer and scholar of medical humanities. I am particularly interested in the cancer narrative and medical education. I am open to writing on these areas for journals and blog posts.
I’m so glad to see this site and to learn of the new MLA forum. I teach early modern literature at Boston College and direct our new minor in Medical Humanities. My recent work has largely been focused on genetic subjectivity–I published a memoir in 2010 with Penguin(What We Have) on my family’s experience with the BRCA1 mutation, and last fall published an edited collection of essays on genetics and identity (The Story Within–Hopkins, 2013). Eager to learn more about the forum and its work.
Sören Fröhlich, doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego. My projects all focus on blood in literature as an overlapping space of semantics, politics, aesthetics, and praxis in “literary” texts, but also medical handbooks and pamphlets, school textbooks, and histories. This topic spans millenia and crosses all periods, genres, disciplines, and regions, so I regard it as a giant puzzle that helps us better understand breadth and depth in canonical as well as neglected texts. My dissertation focuses on U.S. literature between 1848 and the turn of the century, discussing well-known authors like Dickinson, Hawthorne, and Whitman, but also minor or un-studied figures, like William Wells Brown, Edward H. Dixon, Samuel A. Cartwright, and Ludwig von Reizenstein. For the purposes of the dissertation, I narrow the theoretical scaffolding to Foucualt, Norbert Elias, Freud, Kristeva, and some other classics, but I also work on contemporary problems of tissue economies, PLWA, menstruation, and laboratory performance (a little ANT).
I want to thank Thomas and all other members here for sharing resources and insights and I look forward to enlightening debates.
http://ucsd.academia.edu/SFröhlich
Dorothy Woodman, contract instructor in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. My 2012 dissertation is “Bodies and Texts, Spaces and Borders: Women Re-Envision Breast Cancer.”I focus on contemporary North American breast cancer narratives and visual art that critique foundational assumptions of western medicine’s empirical discourse, clinical practices and sovereign institutional spaces. In these texts, the medical subject is consolidated through creating the patient as a foreigner within the sovereign medical space. My interests lay in how these breast cancer “survivors” disrupt Subject/Other formulations and bordered, authoritarian spaces by imagining fluid, dialogic corporeal subjectivities; interconnecting human and non-human subjectivities; and pre-capitalist commons. In “Enfolding Citizenship: Fascist Visions and Grazia Deledda’s The Church of Solitude” I argue that the disrupted body communicates a politics without entering into discourse, and, using Agamben’s ideas on the modern state, analyze the intersection of disease with raced and gendered Othering produced by State disciplinary practices.
I continue to explore and deconstruct medical institutions as sovereign territories and medical reception of patients as a practice of professional hospitality that, according to Derrida, reproduces and requires unequal power, ownership and self-identity, through the binary of Subject/Other. However, as he (influenced by Levinas) suggests, unconditional hospitality, without the violence of privileged power, recognizes the non-identifiable, wholly Other and enables an ethics of being-in-the-world (Levinas). The relation to an/Other in a medical encounter, as being-in-the-world, can be an opportunity for mutual subject formation. Illness, the reason for the encounter, as a matrix of cultural, material and global forces, expands the conditions in which this occurs beyond the regulated performances in the clinic and hospital. Writings such as those I study in my dissertation are thought experiments in what this might look like. This proposed project challenges me to be both expansive and pragmatic. Sovereignty and professional hospitality seem to enable needed efficiencies. My questions are: How can the current constraints of doctor/patient be dismantled and replaced, keeping interventions timely and effective? What would illness, as a human, material condition, and medical interventions, as a socio-political institution, look like if underlying assumptions were put to one side in order for being-in-the world and mutual subject formation to occur through the im/possible practice of unconditional hospitality?
I am under contract to contribute entries by January 31, 2013 on “Reconstructive Surgery” and “Beauty Ideals in the US, 20th-21st Century” for the Cultural Encyclopedia of the Breast (AltaMira Press). “Introducing the Disturbing Pink Superhero!” is a co-authored project on Marvel Comic’s joint venture with the Susan G. Komen Foundation for 2012’s Breast Cancer Month in October, currently under review for the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English Conference in 2013. Under review for the 2013 Canadian Conference on Medical Education, proposed paper “Hospitality and the Hospital” is a Derridean analysis of hospital-ity’s inequitable power differentials and enmity between hospes/doctor and hostis/patient, as well as an exploration of their parallel marginalization within a sovereign medical culture.
I am also a member of an interdisciplinary research team preparing the groundwork for an innovative study based on nursing students’ evaluations of narrative study in a dedicated English course. During Winter Term (2013), a medical resident, and I will facilitate a reading group with participants from Medicine and English and Film Studies on medicine and literature topics. The objective of these projects is to encourage interdisciplinary exploration of health care and humanities topics, and introduce students and educators to new practices in the fields of literature and medicine, narrative medicine, and narrative inquiry.
Hi there. I’m not an MLA scholar, but I am very interested in the conversations going on here, so I thought I’d introduce myself. I’m a PhD student and discourse analyst in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. My primary focus is on disability rights discourse. Over the course of my research in disability studies thus far, I’ve looked at discursive constructions of disability in person-first language, autistic nonverbal communication as a form of self-advocacy, chronotopic conceptions of post traumatic stress in institutional discourse about PTSD, and tensions between neurodiversity and normalization in autism acceptance advocacy discourse. I’m currently investigating the role of the National Council on Disability within the deliberative system around disability rights in the US. I also teach a course called Discourse, Culture, and Identities in which my students and I examine relationships between discourse, cultural identity, and embodiment with regard to gender, sexuality, and dis/ability.
Glad to meet you. 🙂 –Jess (jessica.fridy@colorado.edu)
I am co-founder of Medical Humanities Group of University College of Medical Sciences, University of Delhi, India (First ever in India) as well as founder of ‘Infinite Ability’(a special interest group on disability), Comicos (Graphic Medicine Club) and Coordinator of Enabling Unit (for students with disabilities).
Email: satendra@medicalhumanitiesindia.org
Webpages: http://medicaleducationunit.yolasite.com/medical-humanities.php; http://infiniteability.yolasite.com/; http://theenablist.blogspot.in/; http://comicos-graphicmedicineclub-ucms.blogspot.in/
Research Interests: Theatre of the Oppressed, Disability Studies, Graphic Medicine
I am an Assistant Professor of English at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where I teach Medical Visions in Literature (an upper-level literature and medicine course) and courses in early American literature. While I am interested in all aspects of the medical humanities field, my specialization is in literary representations of health in the early American novel. I am working on a book titled A Medical Examination of the Early American Novel: Fictions of Sickness, Health, and Status in the New Nation. I have also published articles about the connections between health and social belonging in Federalist America. My blog, Domestic Medicine (http://mtuthill.wordpress.com/), contains excerpts from my manuscript along with ongoing reflections about current medical thinking. I am excited about this recognition of the medical humanities by the MLA. I hope to engage in some interesting conversations with members of this community.
I’m not really in this area, but since we’re in the test phase, I thought I’d say hello! I once wrote an article (and have a book chapter) about a 17th century play that features a syphilitic soldier, so I suppose I can say I genuinely share an interest in such things, even if I haven’t done much work on literature and medical history in the past few years.
Thomas Lawrence Long, associate professor-in-residence in the School of Nursing at the University of Connecticut, is the author of AIDS and American Apocalypticism: The Cultural Semiotics of an Epidemic (2005) and co-editor of The Meaning Management Challenge: Making Sense of Health, Illness and Disease (2010). A book in progress, A Plague of Pariahs: AIDS and the Rhetoric of Dissent, examines cultural and medical dissent. He has contributed chapters to the edited collections Gender and Apocalyptic Desire (2005), The Meaning Management Challenge: Making Sense of Health, Illness and Disease (2010), Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives (2006), and Inner Space, Outer Space: Humanities, Technology, and the Postmodern World (1993). His chapters or articles on topics in medical humanities have been included in Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History (2005, 2010), African American National Biography (2010), Encyclopedia of Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic (2008), Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature (2006), Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary (2006), and Encyclopedia of Religious Rituals (2004), including articles on Cotton Mather and William Byrd II. Recent publications include an article on US Union women’s published Civil War nursing narratives (co-authored with Jennifer Telford), an article on medical dissent in the writing of Samuel R. Delany, and an article on the AIDS apocalypticism of Diamanda Galas and David Wojnarowicz. A forthcoming chapter in the Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing focuses on cultural representations of nurses. He is working on an article-length study of William Byrd II’s notions of diet and health. Another project in its infancy is an article on the Hartford subscription publishing marketing of Union nurse narratives, Emma Edmonds’s Nurse and Spy in the Union Army (W.S. Williams, 1865), Frank Moore’s Women of the War (S.S. Scranton, 1867), and Mary Livermore’s My Story of the War (A. D. Worthington, 1889). He is a founding member of the Humanities and Medicine Faculty Study Group of the UConn Humanities Institute.