Medical Humanities Research Institute Participants (Rice University)
Kirsten Ostherr, PhD, MPH, is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English and founding Director of the new Medical Humanities Research Institute at Rice University, one of the only research institutes in the world that is solely dedicated to advancing translational research on human experiences of health and illness. She is a media scholar, health researcher, and technology analyst. She published the first research bringing together “Artificial Intelligence and Medical Humanities” in 2020, and she taught the first U.S. university course bringing a Humanities perspective to “Responsible AI for Health” in 2023. Her research on trust and privacy in digital health ecosystems has been featured in Marketplace Tech on NPR, The Atlantic, STAT, Slate, The Washington Post, Big Data & Society, Catalyst, and the Journal of Medical Humanities. Her writing about the COVID-19 pandemic was featured in The Washington Post, STAT, Inside Higher Ed, and American Literature. Kirsten is currently leading a digital health humanities project called “Translational Humanities for Public Health” that identifies humanities-based pandemic responses from around the world to document and help others build upon these creative efforts, and her work was recently profiled in The Lancet.
She is the author of Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies (Oxford, 2013) and Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Duke, 2005). She is currently writing two books with grant support from the National Library of Medicine and the National Endowment for the Humanities: The Visual History of Computational Health and Virtual Health. She is the recipient of the 2024 Health Humanities Visionary Award from the Health Humanities Consortium.
Melissa Bailar, PhD, is the Executive Director and Senior Lecturer of the Medical Humanities Research Institute, and Associate Director of the Medical Humanities Program. One branch of her research focuses primarily on medical and anatomical museums, particularly questions about their curation and the ways in which their objects play on the uncanny. She is also working on multimedia narratives in collaboration with a patient, Tuwayne Foster, detailing his experiences with the medical system as he suffers from renal failure and the daily challenges patients of color and of low socio-economic status face in navigating medical institutions. She is also part of an international team investigating the socio-cultural effects of radiation exposure stemming from major nuclear events.
Sabia Abidi, PhD, is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Bioengineering. Her technical background in stem cell differentiation, microfluidics, parasitological and microbiological techniques brings valuable knowledge and experience to undergraduate bioengineering education. Her academic experience has focused on teaching courses in bias and medical device design, quantitative physiology, and emerging diseases and global health. She leads a summer immersive program in healthcare innovation at Rice University, Texas Children’s Hospital, and the Texas Heart Institute, funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Travis Alexander, PhD, is a Lecturer in Medical Humanities. His research specialties include post-1945 American literature and film, health humanities, black studies, and sexuality studies. He teaches undergraduate courses for the Medical Humanities Minor on health disparities and protest.
Anthony Brandt, PhD, is a Professor of Composition and Theory at the Shepherd School. He is the Artistic Director of the contemporary music ensemble Musiqa and winner of two Adventurous Programming Awards from Chamber Music America and ASCAP. His honors include a Koussevitzky commission from the Library of Congress, and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Houston Arts Alliance, and the MacDowell and Djerassi Arts Colonies. He and neuroscientist David Eagleman have co-authored The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World (Catapult, 2017). Dr. Brandt has also co-authored several papers on music cognition and a chapter on music’s role in early language acquisition in the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology.
Chin Jou, PhD, is Associate Professor and Brackenridge Endowed Chair in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She will join Rice University in July 2024. Her current book manuscript, Captive Consumers: Prison Food in the Era of Mass Incarceration, examines the history, politics, sociology, and business of prison food in the United States. She is also the author of Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food with Government Help (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and research articles on a range of topics related to U.S. food policies, obesity, African American history, nutrition science, gender and diet culture, race relations, and the prison industrial complex in journals including: American Quarterly, the Journal of Urban History, the New England Journal of Medicine, Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and others.
Samuel Reis-Dennis, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy. His primary philosophical fields are normative ethics, moral psychology, and bioethics. He is interested in the ways in which social strength and weakness inform the way we feel and express moral emotions and shape our interpersonal relationships, including doctor-patient interactions. Some of his current projects focus on the nature and importance of dignity in social and political life (particularly in the context of healthcare), and on the psychology and ethics of resentment and guilt.
Katherine Shwetz, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Associate in Medical Humanities. Her research interests have one foot in literary studies and the other in interdisciplinary medical humanities; her work examines how narrative form and medical beliefs are refracted through narratives about vaccines, contagion, and disease. Her current research project examines the role of literary genre in anti-vaccination conspiracies, with the goal of using the tools of literary analysis to sensitively analyze the charged contemporary conversations around vaccines.
International Workshop Participants
Sari Altschuler, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University, and Founding Director of the Health, Humanities, and Society minor and initiative. Her research focuses primarily on American literature and culture before 1865, literature and medicine, disability studies, and the health humanities, broadly understood. Currently, she directs Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read, an award-winning multi-site and online exhibition about the multi-sensory experiences of reading with David Weimer, and chairs the Critical Health Humanities seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center with Amy Boesky and David Jones.
Emmanuel Didier, PhD, MA, MSc, is the Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research. Originally trained as a statistician, he specializes in the study of statistics as a tool of government. He is now working on a project on big data in the domain of health and especially in genomics. After the Human Genome Project, he argues that genomics is now experiencing a deep transformation initiated by the availability of some huge storage and calculation facilities. His goal is to understand how this new kind of quantification will, at the same time, change the policies governing healthcare, alter the way individuals conceive themselves as subjected to disease, and redefine pluridisciplinarity among specialists. He has published numerous books and articles, including “Statactivisme” and Benchmarking.
Luna Dolezal, PhD, is a Professor of Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. Her research is primarily in the areas of applied phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities. Her work is driven by an interest in understanding lived experience and embodiment, and how these intersect with, are co-determined by, the socio-political and technological frameworks in which we are enmeshed. Her current research is primarily focused on three inter-related themes: (1) shame and self-conscious emotions; (2) embodiment and self-other relations; and (3) emerging medical and body-based technologies.
Eivind Engebretsen, PhD, is a medical humanities scholar and a professor of interdisciplinary health science at the University of Oslo. From 2023, he is the Dean of the Open Campus at the European University Alliance Circle U. He is the founding head of the Sustainable Health Unit (SUSTAINIT) at the Faculty of Medicine (UiO) and its associated Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), a Centre of Excellence in Education funded by the Norwegian Government. His research explores how knowledge about health, especially global health, is produced, legitimized, negotiated, documented, and exchanged throughout the global social fabric.
Kim Gallon, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work investigates the cultural dimensions of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. Her more recent work focuses on the spatial relationship between reading and residential segregation in Baltimore in the twentieth century. She is aso working on a book project on race, digital technology, and health equity. Gallon is the founder and director of two black digital humanities projects, The Black Press Research Collective and COVID Black.
Jeremy A. Greene, MD, PhD, MA, is the William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, Director of the Department of the History of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He also practices internal medicine at the community health facility, East Baltimore Medical Center. His work examines the history of remote access to healthcare from the 1920s to trace the ways different forms of access have provided more equitable access to care and the ways they have exacerbated and created disparities.
Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Director of Medical Humanities at Georgetown University. She is a cultural historian of medicine, medical humanities scholar, and physician. Her research focuses on diagnosis and clinical reasoning, especially diagnostic health disparities. She is writing a cultural and intellectual history of diagnosis and detective practices. She views the humanities and social sciences as key interlocutors of clinical and public health practice and has applied this framework to the COVID-19 pandemic and historical pandemics as well as diagnosis. Along with Dean Dana Williams (Howard), she is principal investigator on a multimillion dollar Mellon Foundation grant to establish a Georgetown Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice in DC.
Sebastian Kuhn, MD, MME, is a Professor of Digital Medicine and Director of the Institute for Digitalisation in Medicine at the University Hospital Giessen-Marburg and Philipps University Marburg. His work focuses on the development, evaluation and implementation of digital health applications and the qualification of doctors in the context of the digital transformation.
Céline Lefève, PhD, is a University Professor of Philosophy and a researcher at UMR 7219 SPHERE at Université Paris Cité. She is co-director of the Institut La Personne En Médecine (l'ILPEM) and director of the Georges Canguilhem Center. Her research focuses on the philosophy of Georges Canguilhem, the ethics of care and the development of medical humanities, and in particular cinema, in medical studies.
Séverine Mathieu, PhD, is the Director of Studies of Religious Sciences at École Pratique des Hautes Études at Paris Sciences and Lettres University. Noting that questions linked to ethics are at the heart of the interrelation between religion and society, she is interested in the ethical issues of reproductive biotechnologies. It is a question of understanding how religion perceives biotechnologies and in return, how the latter work on religious universes from the inside: religious authorities as well as the faithful. She conducts various fields in France in medically assisted procreation services and more recently in embryo reception services, therefore being interested in the fate of surplus embryos. On the formation of benchmarks and ethical standards in the context of secularization, future debates around the revision of bioethics law will also constitute a fruitful area of research.
Ricardo Nuila, MD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab (HEAL) at Baylor College of Medicine. His writing focuses mostly on health disparities, how policies affect real people, and the interface between art and medicine. His short stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthology as well as in McSweeney’s and other literary magazines. The HEAL lab develops educational materials and experiences that weave the arts and humanities into medical education.
Zoe Oftring, MD, MA, works at the Paediatric Centre and at the institute for Digital Medicine at University Hospital Giessen and Marburg - Philipps University Marburg. She does research at the intersection of Paediatric Medicine and Digital Medicine and has a special interest in Medical/Health Humanities.
Thomas Picht, MD, is a Professor of Digital Neurosurgery, Head of the Image Guidance Lab, and Co-Director of the Berlin Simulation and Training Center at Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin. His research group deals with non-invasive brain function diagnostics, connectivity analyses and neuromodulation with the aim of optimally treating brain tumors with individualized therapy concepts. Further focal points are the research of modern visualization strategies for the understanding and mediation of spatially complex structures as well as the establishment of novel simulation concepts in education and surgical practice.
Monika Pietrzak-Franger, PhD, is Chair and Full Professor for British Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Vienna. Her areas of research include contagious diseases and their socio-political role and mediality; adaptation studies, intermediality and transmediality studies; and medial processes of stigmatization and discrimination.
Keisha Ray, PhD, is an Associate Professor with the McGovern Center for Humanities & Ethics, Director of the McGovern Center’s Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration, and the Longitudinal Themes Director for McGovern Medical School. Most of her work focuses on the social, political, and cultural determinants of Black people’s health, integrating race education into medical school curricula, and the ethics of biomedical enhancement. She was also elected as a Hastings Center Fellow in 2024.
Anna Roethe, MD, MA, is a clinician researcher and a cultural scientist at the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory at Humboldt-Universität and Charité University Hospital Berlin, Department of Neurosurgery. Since 2013, she investigates surgical and visual practices in the OR and the mediating role of technology in doctor-doctor and patient-doctor interactions, focusing on both workflow and care optimization, and interdisciplinary research methodology development.
Angela Woods, PhD, is Professor of Medical Humanities and Director of the Institute of Medical Humanities at Durham University. She also serves as the Director of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, funded by a £9.5m Wellcome Trust award (2023-2030). Her research interests and expertise span three linked areas: the interplay between clinical, experiential and cultural-theoretical accounts of voice-hearing and psychosis; narrative and its role in understanding health; and the dynamics of interdisciplinary and collaborative research.