Exploring Health, Culture, & Societies Across the Disciplines

300 College Drive,Sarasota FL 34234

21 October, 2021

Description

Join us for our first in-person campus conversations event of the season! Light refreshments will be served. Due to the location of the event there will be limited seating. Presentors:Kris Fennie, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology; Maneesha Lal, Associate Director of Faculty Development & Associate Director of Corporate & Private Foundation Relations; Miriam Wallace, Professor of English and Gender StudiesWith the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities “Humanities Connections Planning Grant,” a group of New College faculty and experts spent summer 2021 reading, talking, debating the connections between health and culture and the social world. We met with heads of other programs in Health and Medical Humanities to learn about their programs. Together, we created a co-taught course to introduce students to the new Health, Culture, and Societies interdisciplinary “Area of Concentration.” Seemingly simple questions like “what is Health?” and “what is disease?” turned out to be much more complicated than they seemed. Other questions highlighted different ways of understanding the human experience of illness, healing, and wellness—across communities, time, and cultures. We’ll share of what we learned—and some of the challenges as well as excitement of truly cross-disciplinary exploration—and the wide realm of health-related studies and action. Dr. Kristopher Fennie’s research interests centre on the intersection of behavioural and social determinants of health, particularly in the context of global health and vulnerable populations. He has several years of experience working in the field of HIV disease with the goal of understanding how behaviour and societal context influence HIV outcomes, and thereby informing on how to improve health outcomes. He conducts research in the United States (namely Florida), and in Hunan, China. He also is involved with the Yale China Association, and is part of its Health Advisory Committee. His community activities include working with the Multicultural Health Institute. Dr. Maneesha Lal taught South Asian history and the history of women and gender in South Asia at Binghamton University in New York, where she also taught courses on the history of health and medicine in Asia and Asian America. Her scholarship has focused on women physicians and the politics of gender, medicine, and colonialism in British India. At New College, she supports faculty teaching and research and promotes institutional program development through her work in the Provost’s Office and at the New College Foundation. Dr. Miriam Wallace teaches English literature with a focus on British fiction and on literary theory. Her scholarly expertise focuses eighteenth-century and Romantic-era fiction, culture, and politics, with secondary areas in Virginia Woolf, law and literature, and disability studies. She has a particular interest in feminist and gender theories and related theoretical fields, and is a founding member of the Gender Studies faculty. Professor Wallace also publishes on teaching and pedagogical issues in journals from Feminist Teacher to ThirdSpace to a forthcoming issue on teaching 18th and 19th-century laboring class writers in the MLA Options for Teaching series. Support for this event was made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.