The coronavirus pandemic inaugurated a global shift to online learning, working, and socializing. This event considers the immediate and longterm effects such a move has on parents and on forms of mothering in particular. Our panelists will discuss the history, theory, and data of mother's health decision making and pandemic-related disruptions to the family, as well as of familial navigation of disability, education, and adaptive digital devices.

Based on interviews with parents of children with Down syndrome, as well as women who terminated their pregnancies because their fetus was identified as having the condition, Unexpected paints an intimate, nuanced picture of reproductive choice in today’s world. Piepmeier takes us inside her own daughter’s life, showing how Down syndrome is misunderstood, stigmatized, and condemned, particularly in the context of prenatal testing.

Dramatists, scholars, and disability activists have started taking an interest in a deaf Irishwoman who was once considered the premiere national playwright of her day: Teresa Deevy. Interest in her life and works has taken different shapes, from those drawn to her representations of women living circumscribed lives in 1930s Ireland to those who want to recover a neglected history of deaf artistry. In a series of panels, we ask what it means to look in the archives for a writer as elusive as Deevy. Where do we find information about Deevy and her work, and how is this quest inflected by the needs of the present moment? This symposium will include discussions between archivists, scholars, theatre historians, disability activists, performance artists, and directors to examine the various ways of finding Deevy in a historical record that has too often blotted her out. 

  A Medical Disaster and its Aftermaths: The Quest for Sleeping Sickness Eradication in Colonial Africa A talk by Guillaume Lachenal, moderated by Thomas Dodman

Book Launch for Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis, with a response by Evelynn Hammonds

Join us for an online conversation with Chris McGreal, author of "American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts"

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 and health humanities offers 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 artefacts, 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. The Explorations in the Medical Humanities Series explores the enigma of how what we write relates back to the experience of bodies in different stages of health and disease. Our speakers consider how the medical and health 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.

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 artefacts, 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. 

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