Slow Medicine: Time and the Art of Healing
Thursday, March 16th, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Dr Victoria Sweet will be part of the Seminar Series for Medical Education week at the University of Florida. https://education.med.ufl.edu/faculty-development/the-society-of-teaching-scholars/medical-education-week-2/ She will also be giving the AOA talk at the annual banquet for the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society that evening, on “What I wish someone had told me before I started my internship!”
ABOUT DR. SWEET
Dr. Sweet is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in history. She practiced medicine for over twenty years at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, where she began writing.
Fall 2021 Zoom Event “Chronicles of Contagion”
Sponsored by the UF Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment) and the Albert Brick Professorship
As we continue to grapple with the COVID-19 crisis, this event brings together cultural critics and historians to have a wide-ranging conversation across the domains of epidemiology, microbiology, politics, and literature. We will explore the histories of our pandemic present, as well as examine how the current pandemic is deeply tied with our civic and cultural life.
The Collective for Interdisciplinary Scholarship on Medicine and Culture (CISMAC) at the University of Florida is extremely pleased to welcome speakers Priscilla Wald (Duke University; “A Germ’s Eye View: Changing the Story of Covid-19 and Why That Matters”), Alex Chase-Levenson (University of Pennsylvania; “Quarantine and European Sanitary Citizenship, 1800-1850”), and Lorenzo Servitje (Lehigh University; “The Political and Literary Careers of Antimicrobials”). Please join us via Zoom on November 5, 2021 from 3pm-4:30pm.
Register here or at the following link: https://ufl.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIudeGhrj4iHtTLPYVtb1lgBRmFwoX7pI-x
Speaker Details:
Priscilla Wald is the R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English at Duke University working in American literature and culture, specializing in the late-18th to mid-20th centuries as well as contemporary narratives of science and medicine. She is the author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke University Press, 2007) and the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (2020).
Alex Chase-Levenson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania working on borders and boundaries in nineteenth-century Europe, histories of liberalism, and public health. He is the author of The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1780-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Lorenzo Servitje is an Associate Professor of literature and medicine, with a dual appointment in English and Health, Medicine, and Society at Lehigh University. He is the author of Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture (SUNY Press 2021) and co-editor of the collections: The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image (Penn State Press, 2016), Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory (Palgrave, 2016), and Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present (Palgrave, 2017).
Health Humanities Panel: Mentoring Opportunity, April 5 2022
This event would like to be a mentoring moment for students to learn more about health humanities and what UF has ready to offer them. It will also be a get-together opportunity for faculty who have been passionately working in advancing health humanities within UF.
This event is sponsored by One Health Center of Excellence(opens in new tab), UF Health(opens in new tab), UF College of the Liberal Arts and Sciences(opens in new tab), Beyond120(opens in new tab), UF Health Science Center Libraries(opens in new tab), and UF Center for Arts in Medicine(opens in new tab).
FALL 2021 ZOOM EVENT “CHRONICLES OF CONTAGION”
Sponsored by the UF Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment) and the Albert Brick Professorship
As we continue to grapple with the COVID-19 crisis, this event brings together cultural critics and historians to have a wide-ranging conversation across the domains of epidemiology, microbiology, politics, and literature. We will explore the histories of our pandemic present, as well as examine how the current pandemic is deeply tied with our civic and cultural life.
The Collective for Interdisciplinary Scholarship on Medicine and Culture (CISMAC) at the University of Florida is extremely pleased to welcome speakers Priscilla Wald (Duke University; “A Germ’s Eye View: Changing the Story of Covid-19 and Why That Matters”), Alex Chase-Levenson (University of Pennsylvania; “Quarantine and European Sanitary Citizenship, 1800-1850”), and Lorenzo Servitje (Lehigh University; “The Political and Literary Careers of Antimicrobials”). Please join us via Zoom on November 5, 2021 from 3pm-4:30pm.
Register here or at the following link: https://ufl.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIudeGhrj4iHtTLPYVtb1lgBRmFwoX7pI-x
Speaker Details:
Priscilla Wald is the R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English at Duke University working in American literature and culture, specializing in the late-18th to mid-20th centuries as well as contemporary narratives of science and medicine. She is the author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke University Press, 2007) and the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (2020).
Alex Chase-Levenson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania working on borders and boundaries in nineteenth-century Europe, histories of liberalism, and public health. He is the author of The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1780-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Lorenzo Servitje is an Associate Professor of literature and medicine, with a dual appointment in English and Health, Medicine, and Society at Lehigh University. He is the author of Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture (SUNY Press 2021) and co-editor of the collections: The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image (Penn State Press, 2016), Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory (Palgrave, 2016), and Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present (Palgrave, 2017).
2018 Fregly Symposium
On October 4 and 5, 2018, the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries and the Emerging Pathogens Institute are hosting a symposium in honor of Dr. Melvin J. Fregly. This symposium is intended to address social, cultural, and scientific issues raised by mosquito-borne illness, a subject that is vitally important to public health in Florida, the southeastern United States, and Latin America. It will highlight and discuss interdisciplinary approaches by bringing together experts in different fields to describe how each discipline addresses these problems, and in the process, promote discussion among participants as to how interdisciplinary collaboration can enhance the development of innovative solutions. It also will feature current research addressing concerns about emerging mosquito-borne pathogens.
Speakers for the symposium include:
-Dr. Gordon Patterson, a historian from the Florida Institute of Technology, whose work focuses on vector control and the history of mosquito control
-Dr. Phil Lounibos of the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory who works on insect ecology and behavior, especially as applied to mosquito vectors of human diseases
-Dr. Chelsea Smartt, also from of the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory, who studies virus-vector interactions
-Capt. Jeffrey Stancil, commander of the Navy Entomology Center of Excellence (NECE)
In addition to these speakers, the symposium will include a Collaboration with Strangers (CoLab) workshop; a film screening and discussion; exhibits on the history of mosquito-borne illnesses; and a student art show.
There is no cost to attend the symposium, but advance registration is required. Light refreshments will be served at most events. To register, please visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2018-fregly-symposium-tickets-49050633766
For more information about the symposium, see the event LibGuide:
Symposium: “Livestock, Sanitation, Hygiene, and Child Growth: Exploring the Complex Underlying Causes of Child Stunting”
March 1, 2018 (Thursday); 8am-12:30pm
Chamber, ground floor Reitz Union
Undernutrition is an underlying cause of nearly half of all deaths among children under five, and, in Africa, nearly one third of children are chronically undernourished. Chronic malnutrition–as indicated by stunted growth–is not completely reversed by optimized diet and reduced diarrhea. This has led to the hypothesis that a primary underlying cause of stunting–driving up to 40% of growth faltering–is subclinical gut disease and environmental enteric dysfunction (EED). Though EED is associated with unsanitary environments, interventions designed to interrupt these pathways have not shown any additional benefit to child growth, underscoring the need to investigate the role of livestock on the landscape. This symposium will engage multiple lines of inquiry surrounding the interaction of livestock, hygiene, sanitation, and child growth.
Featuring:
- Sarah McKune, University of Florida
- Derek Heady, International Food Policy Research Institute
- Mark Manary, Washington University
- James-Platts Mills, University of Virginia
- Wondwossen Gebreyes, Ohio State University
- Aulo Gelli, International Food Policy Research Institute
- Arie Havelaar, University of Florida
- Jemal Yuosuf, Haramaya University
Sponsored by: the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems and the Center for African Studies.
Panel Discussion: “Revisiting the Vietnam War”
February 27, 2018 (Tuesday); 6pm
Pugh Hall Ocora
Revisiting the Vietnam War, a panel discussion, will be held on Feb. 27 at 6 p.m. in the Pugh Hall Ocora and will feature Vietnam War veterans who will give personal accounts of their experiences during the war and reflect on the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. Topics for discussion will include questions of American involvement and home front war protests; feelings of isolation and under appreciation; the strategic approach of dehumanizing the enemy; and the role of TV coverage in public perception. The panelists will also look at the lingering impacts of drug addictions and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The conversation will be moderated by Dr. Matthew Jacobs, associate professor in the UF Department of History and director of undergraduate academic programs for the UF International Center.
Sponsored by: Bob Graham Center for Public Service and the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program
Intersections Collaborating with Strangers Events
(Dec. 7, Jan. 5, Jan. 11, & Jan. 19)
Intersections: Animating Conversations with the Humanities is a 3-year program of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere at the University of Florida funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Intersections program will fund four Intersections Groups, which are interdisciplinary groups of faculty and graduate students with members from the humanities and allied fields who work together to address grand-challenge questions in their research and teaching. (More information on this funding opportunity is forthcoming.)
All UF faculty, staff, and graduate students are invited to participate in these Intersections Collaborating with Strangers Workshops and Idea Cafe Table events to meet potential collaborations and discover hidden resources for their work.
Collaborating with Strangers (CoLAB) Workshops
Thursday, December 7, 2017: 10am-12pm or Friday, January 5, 2018: 10am-12pm
Smathers Library 100
Hey Stranger…looking for a way to combine forces with other folks in the humanities and beyond? Collaborating with Strangers workshops connect students, faculty, and researchers on campus during 3-minute speed-meetings. You’ll walk away with more resources, solutions, and creative ideas than you ever imagined! Focused conversations will yield the following:
- potential collaborative relationships;
- generation of research “grand-challenge” questions spanning disciplines; and,
- problem solving of issues by discovering hidden resources.
CoLAB Workshops will be followed by lunch.
CoLAB Idea Table Cafes
Thursday, January 11, 2018: 3pm-5pm or Friday, January 19, 2018: 10am-12pm
Smathers Library 100
Join other CoLABers for Idea Table Cafes where we will extend the benefits of CoLAB Workshops by expanding the connections and ideas that were generated during a CoLAB Workshop. This facilitated, casual environment will stimulate new possibilities of working with each other to combine research, teaching, and other collaborative opportunities, including a proposal to the Intersections Research into Teaching Grant.
CoLAB Idea Table Cafe sessions will be followed by a lunch or reception.
**Registration**
To register, email humanities-center@ufl.edu. Include your name, department, date(s) you plan to attend, and your email address. Although we hope that interested scholars will attend a CoLAB Workshop and then an Idea Table Cafe, you are welcome to attend any and all events.
- These events are open to all UF faculty, staff, and students.
- These events are sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, Intersections: Animating Conversations with the Humanities, and the George A. Smathers Libraries.
- For more information, visit: http://www.humanities.ufl.edu/calendar/2017-2018-Intersections-CoLABs.html
Ongoing Exhibits
Life and Limb: The Toll of the Civil War
October 23-December 2, 2017
Health Science Center Library First Floor
More than three million soldiers fought in the war from 1861-1865. More than half a million died, and almost as many were wounded but survived. Hundreds of thousands were permanently disabled by battlefield injuries or surgery, which saved lives by sacrificing limbs. The perspectives of surgeons, physicians, and nurses are richly documented in the history of American Civil War medicine, which highlights the heroism and brutality of battlefield operations and the challenges of caring for the wounded during wartime. Yet the experiences of injured soldiers during the conflict and in the years afterwards are less well-known.
Life and Limb: The Toll of the Civil War explores the experiences of these veterans, who served as a symbol of the fractured nation and a stark reminder of the costs of the conflict.
Life and Limb: The Toll of the American Civil War focuses on disabled veterans and their role as symbols of the fractured nation.
More info on this exhibit at http://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/civilwarexhibits and https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/lifeandlimb/index.html
Binding Wounds, Pushing Boundaries: African Americans in Civil War Medicine
November 13-December 23, 2017
Health Science Center Library First Floor
Many histories have been written about medical care during the American Civil War, but the participation and contributions of African Americans as nurses, surgeons and hospital workers have often been overlooked. Binding Wounds, Pushing Boundaries: African Americans in Civil War Medicine looks at the men and women who served as surgeons and nurses and how their work as medical providers challenged the prescribed notions of race and gender.
More info on this exhibit at http://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/civilwarexhibits and https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/bindingwounds/index.html
Talk: History of Disability Rights in the United States
Wednesday, November 15 (12-1pm)
Communicore C1-17
Dr. Mary Ellen Young, UF College of Public Health and Health Professions and Dr. Anthony Delisle, Center for Independent Living of North Central Florida, Gainesville, will highlight the history of disability rights in the United States.
More info at http://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/civilwarexhibits
Women, Diabetes, and Health Equity: A Panel Discussion
Tuesday, November 14 (4:30-6:30pm)
Harrell Medical Education Building
In celebration of World Diabetes Day
Panel members include Lisa Scarton, Ph.D., RN, Laura Guyer, Ph.D., MEd, RDN, Ashby Walker, Ph.D., Latoya O’Neal, Ph.D., Sarah Westen, Ph.D. Sponsored by the UF Diabetes Institute, the College of Nursing, the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, the College of Public Health and Health Professions, and IFAS.
We encourage attendees to arrive early because this event has garnered a great deal of interest.
“The Islamic Saint as Healer: Bodies and Bodies Politic in Morocco”
Ellen Amster (McMaster University)
Friday, 7 April, 11:45 am – 1:40 pm, Keene-Flint 5
Traditional healing in Morocco, or the non-biomedical practices that people engage in to find relief from sickness and affliction, often involve Islamic saints (awliya’). What are these practices? Why do people do this and what does it mean?
Traditional healing has been understood in different ways—as a way to represent ourselves to ourselves, as a healing of spirit (as opposed to organic cures of biomedicine), or as popular religion, superstition, witchcraft, primitivism, quackery, and charlatanism.
Amster suggests that traditional medicines are a window into the reality of the human body and into human being. Saint healing in Morocco allows us to realize that we see the body through a narrow modern frame, a blinkered vision that excludes other realities. “Saint healing” reveals the human body as a meeting-place of the divine and the corporeal, of the individual and the community, a place of narrative, history, and existence. The body is linked to the body politic, and the body politic to the body. We consider a variety of methods and interpretive sources to deconstruct this healing, suggest connections to similar or different phenomena elsewhere, and connect healing to history, geography, and sacred space.
Lunch will be served. To RSVP, please email with any dietary restrictions to: humanities-center@ufl.edu. Upon receipt of an RSVP, the following seminar reading will be circulated:
Amster, Ellen J. “Healing the Body, Healing the Umma: Sufi Saints and God’s Law in a Corporeal City of Virtue.” InMedicine and the Saints: Science Islam and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
Amster will also be giving a public talk, “A Doorway to the Divine: Islamic Bodies and the Sufi Saints as Connecting the Living to the Dead” on Thursday, 6 April at 5:30 pm in Smathers Library 100. More information about Amster and her public talk can be found here: http://www.humanities.ufl.edu/calendar/20160406-Amster.html.
Death: Confronting the Great Divide Public Lecture
1 February, Wednesday, 7:00 pm, Millhopper Branch Library (3145 NW 43rd Street, Gainesville)
Into the Open: What Animals Can Teach Us about Death
Jessica Pierce (Bio-ethicist, Writer, Religious Studies Scholar)
What we can learn about death, and about caring for those who are nearing the end of life, from our experiences with animals? The simple answer: A lot! This talk will explore what kinds of “death awareness” animals might possess, and will look at some fascinating reports of death-related behavior, including grieving, in both wild and domesticated animals. We’ll also examine human cultural, psychological and moral attitudes toward and practices related to animal death, focusing particularly on the death of companion species such as dogs and cats, and on the growing field of veterinary hospice and palliative care. Here we find a rich source of insight on caring for dying animals, and also a useful comparative ground thinking about our own death and the death of our human loved ones.
Jessica Pierce is a bio-ethicist and non-fiction writer who earned a M.Div. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in religious ethics from the University of Virginia. She is an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, written in collaboration with cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff; The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the Ends of Their Lives; and most recently, Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets. Her other publications have appeared in the Journal of Bio-Ethical Inquiry, the Journal of Environmental Philosophy, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as popular articles for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
This event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.humanities.ufl.edu
Faculty/Graduate Lunch Seminar
2 February 2017, Thursday, 11:45am-1:40pm, UF Vet School Small Animal Hospital (#75) Banfield Room (340A)
Confluence: When the Science of Animal Emotion Meets Death and Dying
Dr. Jessica Pierce
**A Campus Cab will depart from Walker Hall at 11:30am and return at 1:50pm to take seminar attendees to the Vet School.
This seminar will explore how the growing science of animal cognition and emotion might influence how we approach the death and dying of animals, with particular attention to companion dogs and cats. In what ways might death harm animals? How can we trust our judgments about whether or not an animal is suffering “too much”? Why are these questions so hard? And why do our answers to these questions matter? Participants will be sent several essays to read in advance of the discussion.
Lunch will be served. To RSVP, please email with any dietary restrictions to: humanities-center@ufl.edu. Please also note if you’d like to take a seat in the Campus Cab to drive to the seminar from Walker Hall. Upon receipt of an RSVP, the following seminar readings will be circulated:
- Alice Crary (2016) Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (pp. 150-160 required, entire chapter “All Human Beings and Animals Are Inside Ethics” suggested)
- Jessica Pierce (2013) “The Dying Animal” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 10(4): 469-478. (required)
- Jessica Pierce (2012) “Deciding When a Pet Has Suffered Enough” The New York Times, September 22. (optional)
- Frans de Waal (2016) “What I Learned From Tickling Apes” The New York Times, April 8. (optional)
Documentary Screening
My Kid is Not Crazy: A Search for Hope in the Face of Misdiagnosis
Tim Sorel
19 January 2017, 6:30 p.m., Gannett Auditorium, UF Campus
For more information, email tsorel@jou.ufl.edu or visit www.mykidisnotcrazy.com.
Reception
HIV/AIDS Awareness in Florida: Capturing the Process
Tisha Van Pelt, second year medical student
19 January 2017, 4-6:00 p.m., Criser Cancer Resource Center, Shands Cancer Hospital (South Tower), UF Campus
The Health Science Center Libraries and the Center for Arts in Medicine collaborated to create informational videos on HIV/AIDS, targeting at-risk groups to encourage individuals to know their status, and addressing misinformation on this stigmatized medical condition. Written and directed by Jeffrey Pufahl, Center for Arts in Medicine and filmed and edited by Matthew Daley, Health Science Center Libraries, these films are available for viewing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEQTru_CnNo&list=PLIgMqnaPv2swW1SCbH6CX2BICJ73aBcav . The photography show highlights the filming process for three of the four videos. The exhibit will be on display through January. Snacks provided.
Reception sponsored by the Center for Arts in Medicine.
HESCAH SYMPOSIUM: CRITICAL, CLINICAL, CURATORIAL
The symposium invites an in-depth exploration of the various educational programs and exhibitions that make up the intertwined histories of art and therapy, modern art and self-taught artists, art and madness. By focusing on these interrelated histories, the symposium does not seek to question whether therapeutic work constitutes “art,” but rather to engage questions concerning the works’ sites of production, distribution, and reception, and the ways these histories have intersected in meaningful ways for a renewed understanding of art’s histories.
College of the Arts, Lecture Hall FAB 0105
Friday, October 21 | 6 pm – 8 pm
Opening comments and introduction
Kaira M. Cabañas, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Florida
Film Screening of Caligari and the Sleepwalker (2008) (approx. 27 min) by Javier Téllez followed by a Q&A between the artist and curator Jesús Fuenmayor
Chandler Auditorium, Harn Museum
Saturday, October 22 | 10:30 am – 12:30 pm
Introduction Kerry Oliver-Smith, Curator of Contemporary Art, The Harn Museum
Method, Madness, Montage
W. J. T. Mitchell, Professor of Art History and English, University of Chicago
The lecture deals with the syndrome known as “apophenia,” the tendency to find patterns where none exist. It traces this primarily in the procedures of the visual atlas and the evidence wall, from the art historian Aby Warburg to the mathematician John Nash. Side-glances at astrology, natural history, police procedurals, and Edward Snowden’s NSA Powerpoints will be framed within Carlo Ginzburg’s concept of “conjectural knowledge.”
Common Creativities
Kaira M. Cabañas, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Florida
The lecture describes how modern art in Brazil developed in dialogue with the creative work of psychiatric patients. It situates this history within an international perspective, turning to French artist Jean Dubuffet’s search for what he called art brut, a search he extended to Brazil. The talk analyzes how patients’ art was put to work in ways that reveal the continuities and discontinuities between cultural contexts.
12:30 pm Lunch break
1:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Introduction Briley Rasmussen, Assistant Professor and Director of Museum Studies, University of Florida
Parsing Difference
Lynne Cooke, Curator Special Projects in Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
The lecture addresses a range of post-war artifacts based in textiles, some of which would likely be classified under the rubric of crafts and others as fine art objects. Similarly, their makers might be seen as self-taught/folk/outsider artists or as avant-garde contemporary practitioners. This talk will explore how and why such classificatory systems operate and the investments they inscribe.
Painting Process
Suzanne Hudson, Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts, University of Southern California
The lecture uses the case study of the painter Robert Ryman, an artist who learned to paint within the context of the Museum of Modern Art and its school, to argue for the persistence of self- taught American aesthetics within mainstream modernism, largely unacknowledged. In addition to addressing the historical conditions of the museum as an educational site, this talk will suggest how an emphasis on process above product remains one of its hallmarks and legacies.
Public reception to follow, free and open to the public
Documentary Film: Thank You For Playing
Directed and Produced by David Osit & Malika Zouhali-Worrall
Thursday, 29 September 2016 – 5:30-7:30 pm, REVE Polymodal Immersive Classroom Theater, Norman Gym (SW Corner of Norman Hall), UF Campus *Followed by a Q&A with the Filmmakers
“Thank You for Playing” is a film that chronicles the day-to-day challenges of Ryan and Amy Green as they grapple with the illness of their son Joel, who has suffered from cancer since the age of one. With the challenge of creating some normalcy for their family of five, they find some solace in creating a tribute to him, a haunting video game “That Dragon, Cancer” that captures both his voice and their experiences, both happy and sad, over the four-year period of his illness. The resulting documentary explores how video game design can be a way to humanize terminal illness, and also grapples with the distinctions between art and gaming in following the reception of this “game” in the gaming community.
This event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers via Skype.
This event is second in an eight-part speaker series called Death: Confronting the Great Divide. This series invites nationally renowned scholars and filmmakers to explore unique cultural and historical confrontations with death.
For more information about the series, please visit: http://www.humanities.ufl.edu/calendar-2016-17-Speaker-Series.html.
More Human than Human: The Work of Life in the Age of Biotechnical Reproduction
Priscilla Wald (Duke University)
29 January 2015, 5:30 pm, Smathers Library (East) 100, UF Campus
A woman pregnant with her grandchild; a hamster in a state of suspended animation; human cells reproducing into eternity. These are some of the biotechnological innovations that seemed to blur the line between science and science fiction in the decades following the Second World War. Public accounts of these innovations emerged against the backdrop of debates in social and political thought surrounding the atrocities of two global conflagrations and, more broadly, colonialism. Legal cases and policy debates, the mainstream media and popular fiction and film all attest to the convergence of scientific innovation and geopolitical transformation in new accounts of the human—and of life itself—in the decades following the war. Questions abounded: if we can create life in a laboratory and patent it in the courts, what will happen to the basic dignity of humankind? What will happen to human relationships to other humans and to the world at large? Such questions circulated through the courts and the media, but it was in the science fictional scenarios that writers could work through the dangers and possibilities, the hopes and fears, associated with the science and register as well the emergence of new histories–scientific creation stories–for humanity in the age of biotechnology. This talk draws on the legal cases and policy debates, news accounts and especially science fiction—with a focus on Ridley Scott’s cinematic adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: the 1982 cult classic Bladerunner–to chronicle the scientific creation stories that emerged to explain the radically changing figure of the human, to forecast its destiny, and to create by imagining a biotechnological world.
Priscilla Wald teaches and works on U.S. literature and culture as Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Her current work focuses on the intersections among the law, literature, science, and medicine. Her recent book, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, studies the evolution of the contemporary stories we tell about the global health problem of “emerging infections.” She is currently at work on a book-length study entitled Human Being After Genocide, which chronicles the challenge to conceptions of human being that emerged from scientific and technological innovation in the wake of the Second World War. She is especially interested in analyzing how the language, narratives and images in mainstream media promote a particular understanding of genomic science that is steeped in (often misleading) cultural biases and assumptions. She is committed to promoting conversations among scholars from science, medicine, law and cultural studies in order to facilitate a richer understanding of these issues. Wald is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Duke, 1995). Dr. Wald has served on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and is currently the MLA representative to the American Council of Learned Societies; she recently completed a term as President of the American Studies Association. She has a secondary appointment in Women’s Studies, is on the steering committee of ISIS (Information Sciences + Information Studies) and is a member of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy and an affiliate of the Trent Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities and the Institute for Global Health.
- This event is free and open to the public.
- For more information, contact humanities-center@ufl.edu.
- UF Synergies: The Politics of Pandemics in a Global Frame; April 19 @4pm
UF Synergies talk by Tedder Family Doctoral Fellows on Wednesday, April 19, 2023 @ 4:00 pm
Suvendu Ghatak (Ph.D Student, English) – “Malarial Modernity: Colonialism and the Politics of Health in Modern South Asia”
In this presentation, Suvendu Ghatak will describe how in colonial South Asia, malaria became marked as the pathology of primitivity and degeneracy. Reading across medical, administrative, and literary archives in English, Bengali, and Hindi, between 1780 and 1950, he identifies the conjunctures of medical and cultural narratives in shaping this history. He demonstrates how the symbolization of colonial rule as a deliverance out of malaria into modernity obscured the role of modern colonial policies in shaping malarial epidemics. He concludes by tracing the continuities of this colonial semantics of malaria in postcolonial polities of South Asia.
Katherine McNamara (Ph.D. Student, Environmental and Global Health) — “People, Plants, and Pandemics”
Katherine McNamara’s research in Ecuador leverages archival and anthropological methods to explore how relationships between people and medicinal plants evolve as health ecologies shift. Using two disease events as focal points — the emergence of malaria in the 17th century and the COVID-19 pandemic — she positions present-day relationships with quina (Cinchona officinalis), the endangered tree from which quinine and hydroxychloroquine ...
- Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing
- Thursday, March 16th, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Slow Medicine: Time and the Art of Healing
Dr Sweet will be part of the Seminar Series for Medical Education week at the University of Florida. https://education.med.ufl.edu/faculty-development/the-society-of-teaching-scholars/medical-education-week-2/ She will also be giving the AOA talk at the annual banquet for the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society that evening, on “What I wish someone had told me before I started my internship!”
ABOUT DR. SWEET
Dr. Sweet is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in history. She practiced medicine for over twenty years at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, where she began writing.
- History of Science and Medicine Lecture Series February 8, 15, and 22nd 2023
History of Science and Medicine Lecture series:
Yellow Fever in America: Epidemics, medicine, and race in 18th and 19th century America.
Contact person: Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig nstoyan@ufl.edu
These events are made possible by funding from the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, Margaret and Robert Rothman Endowment.
Title: Benjamin Rush and the American transition from colony to republic through medical systems
Wednesday February 8, 2023, 12:00-12:50 PM.
Speaker: Dr. Sarah Naramore, assistant professor at Northwest Missouri State University, explores Benjamin Rush’s contribution to medical treatments and theories, that included ideas about racial immunity to disease.
Registration/Webinar link: https://ufl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0spk9qkIQwWQzbdqmM9z-g
Title: Yellow fever, race, and ecology in New OrleansWednesday February 15, 2023, 12:00- 12:50 PM.Speaker: Dr. Urmi Engineer Willoughby, is a professor at Murray State University has focused her research on the disease and ecology in North America, exploring histories of disease and medicine from a global and ecological perspective.Registration/Webinar link: https://ufl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bAeWPQxbSkaDm7Hex6yJ7Q
Talk topic: Medicalization of race in America in the Atlantic world and in Philadelphia, 1793
Wednesday, February 22, 2023, 12:00-12:50 PM.
Speaker: Dr. Rana Hogarth is an associate professor of History at the ...
- Health Humanities Panel April 5 at 6:00 pm
This event would like to be a mentoring moment for students to learn more about health humanities and what UF has ready to offer them. It will also be a get-together opportunity for faculty who have been passionately working in advancing health humanities within UF.
This event is sponsored by One Health Center of Excellence(opens in new tab), UF Health(opens in new tab), UF College of the Liberal Arts and Sciences(opens in new tab), Beyond120(opens in new tab), UF Health Science Center Libraries(opens in new tab), and UF Center for Arts in Medicine(opens in new tab).
- Forum on Health, Medicine, and Culture
Five distinguished speakers from different disciplines presented their current work, followed by attendees break-out sessions to raise awareness of the diversity of work happening at UF, identify potential overlap in our interests, and discuss opportunities for collaboration.
Speakers:
Michael S. Okun, M.D. “Bridging the Cultural and Language Divide in Parkinson’s Disease”
Dr. Okun is considered a world’s authority on Parkinson’s disease treatment, and his publications provide a voice and an outlet to empower people…
Hosted by:
- Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing