End Date : March 30, 6:00 pm
Heyman Center for the Humanities, Common Room
Dr. Arden Hegele
Dr. Rishi Goyal
Dr. Lan Li
Dr. Heidi Hausse
Dr. Carmel Raz
Dr. Benjamin Breen
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities;
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society/ Medicine, Literature, and Society;
The Center for Science and Society;
Columbia Global Centers Paris;
Medical Humanities and Ethics;
University Seminar in Affect Studies;
University Seminar in Disability, Culture and Society.
As a set of disciplines, the humanities face the challenge of how to write about embodied experiences that resist easy verbal categorization such as illness, pain, and healing. The recent emergence of interdisciplinary frameworks such as narrative medicine has offered a set of methodological approaches to address these challenges. Conceptualizing a field of medical humanities provides a broad umbrella under which to study the influence of medico-scientific ideas and practices on society. Whether by incorporating material culture such as medical artifacts, performing symptomatic readings of poems and novels, or excavating the implicit medical assumptions underlying auditory cultures, the approaches that emerge from a historiographical or interpretive framework are different from those coming from the physician’s black bag.
This two-day workshop will continue the work of the Explorations in the Medical Humanities lecture series from 2017-2018, with a new emphasis on creating an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars from a variety of institutions. By bringing scholars working in the medical humanities to Columbia and inviting them to present their work-in-progress to our local experts, our workshop will explore the enigma of how what we write relates back to the experience of bodies in different stages of health and disease. Our speakers will explore how the medical humanities build on and revise earlier notions of the “medical arts.” At stake are the problems of representation and the interpretation of cultural products from the past and present through medical models, and the challenge of establishing a set of humanistic competencies (observation, attention, judgment, narrative, historical perspective, ethics, creativity) that can inform medical practice.
On March 29-30, 2019, we will host a workshop, “Explorations in the Medical Humanities,” with invited speakers from a range of disciplines and humanistic institutions. The event will take place at the Heyman Center for the Humanities. We will feature the work of interdisciplinary speakers in three 90-minute panels organized according to theme and topic, each with two visiting participants and a local respondent from Columbia, as well as a New Books panel organized around themes of gender and race. The workshop will also feature two collaborative roundtables that critically engage with and produce creative approaches to pedagogy in the medical and health humanities. Lan Li will be moderating a syllabus design workshop as well as a creative writing roundtable with local and visiting experts.
The principal investigators and a visiting member of the Executive Committee (Dr. Hausse) will serve as panel chairs, and will give the introductory and concluding remarks. The workshop will be open to all members of campus who pre-register, and will be advertised through the Heyman Center, CSS, and ICLS-MLS mailing lists, as well as to the medical students and members of the uptown Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and the Narrative Medicine program.
Unless otherwise noted, all events will take place in the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Second Floor Common Room.
Schedule:
Friday, March 29
1:00 Welcome
1:15 – 2:45 1 Beyond Physicians: Health and Individual Responsibility in History
Meg Leja (Binghamton U), “Ritualizing Habits: Patterns and Pronouncements of Bodily Expertise.”
Alex Chase-Levenson (U Penn), “Morals, Habits, and Plagues: Self- Regulation and Epidemic Disease in the Nineteenth Century”
Respondent: Heidi Hausse (Auburn University) Chair: Tillmann Taape (History)
3:00-4:30 2 Medical Archives: A Postmortem
Guillaume Lachenal (Université Paris Diderot/and Sciences Po), “Archival tourism in global health land: Archeological approaches of colonial medical archives in central Africa.”
Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (McGill University / Weill Cornell Medicine), “Archive Fever Redux: Reflections on the History of Psychiatry”
Respondent: Joelle Abi-Rached (SoF/Heyman)
Chair: Kavita Sivaramakrishnan (Mailman School of Public Health)
4:45-6:15 3 Syllabus Design Collaborative Roundtable
Roanne Kantor (Stanford, Comparative Literature)
Nicole Wallack (University Writing Program)
Rishi Goyal (ICLS-Medicine, Literature and Society)
Chair: Lan Li (CSS/PSSN)
Saturday, March 30
9:30-11:00 4 Mind-Body Problems
Matthew Rebhorn (James Madison University), “80 Ounces of Blood, or, Notes towards a Neural Literary History of Antebellum America”
Zoe Wool (Rice University), “Homunculus Revolts”
Respondent: David Hayes (Union College)
Chair: Rishi Goyal (ICLS-Medicine, Literature and Society, Columbia)
11:15-12:45 5 Miracle and Experiment
Rob Boddice (Freie Universität Berlin / McGill University), “Representing Experiment: Medical Science and the Art of Public Relations, 1908-14”
Respondent: Thomas Dodman (French)
Chair: Warren Kluber (SoF/Heyman Graduate Fellow)
2:00-3:30 6 New Books in the Health Humanities
Sasha Turner (Quinnipiac U), Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica (2017)
Deirdre Cooper Owens (CUNY, Queens College), Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017)
Respondents: Christopher Florio (SoF/Heyman), Cristobal Silva (English and Comparative Literature)
Chair: Arden Hegele (SoF/Heyman)
3:30-4:00pm Closing Discussion: Heidi Hausse (Auburn University)
4:00pm Reception
A link to the first day’s page may be found here.
