Auburn speaker series establishing medical, health humanities community across disciplines

Charlotte Tuggle | 9/3/2024

Watercolor painting of two hands holding a brain

The Medical and Health Humanities Speaker Series, launching this fall on Auburn University's campus, hopes to bring together faculty, staff, students and community members to introduce the importance of the humanities in health care.

The speaker series is spearheaded by the Department of History in the College of Liberal Arts. Associate Professors Heidi Hausse and Jennifer Kosmin, experts in health care history, organized the series.

"This series is designed to bring scholars from outside of Auburn whose work unequivocally speaks to the value of humanistic viewpoints to learn about and advocate for health and health care," Kosmin said. "Our hope is that this programming will build a community across disciplines and start a dialogue about medical and health humanities at Auburn."

Each talk will be held from 4-5:30 p.m. in room 2510 of the Mell Classroom Building. The fall schedule features three talks:

Tangled Tendrils: Disability and Pain within Health Narratives

Jaipreet Virdi, Department of History, University of Delaware

Tuesday, Sept. 17

Novel Assays: What Dracula Can Tell Us about Antibiotic Resistance

Lorenzo Servitje, Department of English, Lehigh University

Tuesday, Oct. 15

How Medical Humanities Can Save the Humanities

Gregory Pence, Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Tuesday, Nov. 12

The inaugural event on Sept. 17 will include a reception of tea, coffee and snacks.

"While the history department is spearheading this series launch, many other CLA departments as well as departments and programs across campus are supporting it," Hausse said. "There's real enthusiasm to make this a truly interdisciplinary venture that brings faculty and students from different colleges and academic disciplines together."

Co-sponsors in the College of Liberal Arts include the Department of English; Department of Philosophy; Department of Political Science; Department of Psychological Sciences; Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work; Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences; Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures; and the School of Communication and Journalism.

Other co-sponsors from across campus include the College of Agriculture, the College of Education's Department of Special Education, the College of Human Sciences' Department of Nutritional Sciences, the College of Nursing Outreach, the College of Sciences and Mathematics' Biomedical Sciences Program and Pre-Health Programs, the Honors College and Rural Health Initiative.

The 2024 Medical and Health Humanities Speaker Series is supported in part by the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities and the Alabama Humanities Alliance.

Tags: History English Philosophy Political Science Psychological Sciences Sociology Speech Language and Hearing Sciences World Languages Literatures and Cultures Communication and Journalism Center for the Arts and Humanities

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