About

History

The Medical Humanities Network is a collaboration growing out of a wider project at the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded CHCI grants totaling $2.55 million in support of a project titled “Integrating the Humanities across National Boundaries.”  Designed to foster new forms of collaborative research among CHCI members and to advance innovative programmatic ideas across national, regional, and disciplinary boundaries, this pilot project explored the ways in which a networked consortium can further scholarly innovation in the humanities on a global scale. Originally funded by a sub-grant of the pilot project, the Medical Humanities Network was led by six partnering humanities centers, located at

• Columbia University 
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• King's College London
• University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
• Dartmouth College
• The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Participation in the Network has since greatly expanded (see list of affiliated institutions below). The development of this website was sponsored by centers and institutes including The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, WiSER  in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities  and the Health and Humanities Lab at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill,  Medical Humanities at Kings College London, the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University , and the Center for the Humanities at the University of Miami. The website is intended to maximize research discovery, accuracy, and open dissemination, and to evaluate impact, in the fields of health and medical humanities.

Other projects of the Medical Humanities Network have included annual conferences called Summer Institutes, held respectively at Dartmouth College (2015), Kings College London (2016), the University of Miami (2017), Duke University (2018), Columbia Global Centers | Paris (2019), which was followed by a Summer School for early career researchers, and the University of Odense (2021). The six original sub-grant partners also sponsored a research project focused on aging, undergirded by collaborative reflection on issues of evidence, value, and evaluation.

As membership has expanded and the sub-grant has concluded, the Network has continued to organize annual research panels at the Annual Meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) , hosted at universities around the world. The CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Network website has moved back from a curatorship at the Health Humanities Lab (HHL) at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University to its original host, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

CHCI

Established in 1988, the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes is a network for the circulation of information, ideas, and best practices related to the programmatic and organizational dimensions of humanities centers and institutes. CHCI is currently comprised of over 180 member and affiliate organizations in 23 countries and 46 US states. CHCI members are engaged in a wide range of programs, including research support, public humanities programs, fellowship programs, activism and advocacy on issues of educational and cultural policy, digital humanities programs, partnerships with arts organizations, and the development and maintenance of research collections. Many CHCI members are powerful agents of growth, change, and transformative, interdisciplinary research on their campuses and within their communities. More information on CHCI can be found at http://chcinetwork.org. In addition to the Medical Humanities Network, Mellon-Funded CHCI collaborations include (among others):  Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging ;  Humanities for the Environment ; and  Integrative Graduate Humanities Education Research and Training .

Navigation

The Projects section of this site is open to research participants collaborating on cross-disciplinary Medical Humanities Network projects. Each project page on this site serves as a repository of shared documents and research, a venue in which participants can share ideas and advance discussion, and work toward project goals from around the world. Project pages also include overviews of Summer Institutes, whereby CHCI medical humanities scholars have come together to share insights and research.

Registered members of the site will be able to access the Community Commons, nested beneath the "Projects" tab. The Community Commons is an area for all participants to join in discussions, upload documents, and share references on topics of general interest in the medical humanities.