You came from Toronto to join Rice University. What most surprised you about Houston?
How cool it is! I have really fallen in love with Houston; I love how vibrant and kind of scrappy the city is? Houston has a really distinct identity and strong community spirit that I love. Also, we truly do not have queso in Canada the way there Houston has queso… I’ve been ruined for all other food.
What did you do before coming to Rice?
One hundred thousand things, honestly. I worked in academic administration, as a health policy analyst, as a course instructor, as a writing instructor, as an application coach for medical school, as a teaching assistant, as a research assistant…in the distant past I was a film projectionist, a community-based researcher, a cheesemonger, a bellhop, a petsitter—the list goes on. I’ve always been curious about the world and had a kind of improv-rules “yes, and” approach to my life. I’ve learned important and surprising things from each experience, which has made me a big believer in the value of “trying things out” and being open to unexpected opportunities.
What is your current research project?
My current research project examines the role that literary genres, like science fiction or thriller, are playing in how prominent vaccine skeptics are talking about vaccines. It’s well known that the vaccine hesitancy movement relies on sophisticated storytelling, but researchers don’t yet know much about the literary dimensions of these stories. My hope is that identifying what genres are showing up in these public narratives and how they are being used can help us identify the deeper meanings and connotations these stories carry and the audience expectations they may cultivate.
You just presented your research at the MHRI’s workshop at the Rice Paris campus. What was your favorite aspect of the workshop? Of Paris?
The workshop was amazing! It was incredible to hear the current work of so many incredible researchers in the field. I particularly loved the shared language of the conference; because everyone in the conference worked in the medical humanities and had a shared context, the discussion could go deep and precise really quickly. The physical space was so beautiful--some of the Rice staff there talked to us about the long history of the building, which is centuries old! It was a real pleasure to have this incredible intellectual experience in such a beautiful city and space. And, of course, spending a few days in Paris wasn’t the worst thing to happen in my summer.
What has been your favorite teaching moment in a medical humanities class here?
I taught a class on Zombies in fall 2023 and one of the activities we did was a sort of “disaster scenario” exercise, but for a zombie apocalypse. I was amazed at how creative and intellectually curious the students were in the activity—not only did they come up with (sometimes hilarious) points about how they’d navigate a zombie apocalypse, they really brought their critical thinking skills to bear on how they imagined this disaster functioning in the larger context of the class.