Steering Committee

Rishi K. Goyal

Director, Medicine, Literature and Society Major, Columbia University

Rishi K. Goyal is Director of the Medicine, Literature and Society major in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, and an Attending Physician in the Emergency Department of Columbia University’s Medical Center. Dr. Goyal’s research, writing and teaching focuses on the reciprocal transformation that results when new ideas about health, disease and the body find forms of expression in fiction and memoirs. His most recent work explores the political, aesthetic, and social dimensions of the representation of physical trauma in literature. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning, Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books among other places.

Chisomo Kalinga

Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh

Dr Chisomo Kalinga is a Wellcome-funded postdoctoral fellow in the medical humanities at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the founder of the Malawi Medical Humanities Network (www.malawimedhumsnetwork.com), a research network for the medical humanities based in Malawi. Her research interests are disease (specifically sexually transmitted infections), illness and wellbeing, biomedicine, traditional healing and witchcraft and their narrative representation in African oral and print literatures.

Robin McCrary

Associate Teaching Professor in Writing Studies and Health Humanities, Syracuse University

Robin Micah McCrary is a Creole public health humanist. Author (as Micah McCrary) most recently of Teaching Cultural Dexterity in Creative Writing (Bloomsbury) his work also appears or is forthcoming through Public Health Humanities, Health Professions and Comics, the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), the Canadian Association for Health Humanities (CAHH), the Health Humanities Consortium (HHC) and the Graphic Medicine International Collective (GMIC). 2024–2025 Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Anti-Racism and BIPOC Communities and Visiting Scholar in Health Humanities at the University of Waterloo, Dr. McCrary lives on Haudenosaunee homelands where he is associate teaching professor in the Writing Studies and Health Humanities programs at Syracuse University, community partner in the University of Waterloo’s School of Public Health Sciences, and mentor-teacher and low-residency faculty in Wilkes University’s Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing.

Hester Oberman

Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Arizona

Dr. Hester Oberman’s research focuses on the intersection between spiritual/religious experiences and observable scientific data. Her recent areas of research include religion and violence; the psychology of spirituality; the nature of belief in the twenty-first century; and the influence of faith traditions and spirituality in health care and medicine. She teaches interdisciplinary courses in the Religious Studies Program on religion, psychology, and science, which are crosslisted with the Department of Psychology and the Department of Philosophy. She also teaches for the University of Arizona Honors College. She is Vice-President of the American Academy of Religion in the Western Region (AAR/WR), and a chair of the AAR/WR sections on Philosophy of Religion and Psychology, Culture and Religion. Her current book project is titled Postmodern Perspectives on Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion.

Helen Ouyang

Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Columbia University

Helen Ouyang is a practicing emergency physician, Associate Professor at Columbia University, and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She is also a fellow at the Type Media Center. She has written for The Atlantic, Harper’s, Los Angeles Times, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. Her writing has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and funded by The Pulitzer Center. 

Matthew Reznicek

Associate Professor of Medical Humanities, University of Minnesota

Tanya Sheehan

Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jetté Professor of Art, Colby College

Tanya Sheehan is Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jetté Professor of Art at Colby College, Chair of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, and Principal Investigator of Colby’s inaugural Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab, Critical Medical Humanities: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Medicine. Across her career, Dr. Sheehan has worked at the intersection of American art history, medical humanities, and critical race studies. Her scholarship includes two books, Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018), and six edited volumes, most recently Modernism, Art, Therapy (2024, with Suzanne Hudson). Her forthcoming book from Yale University Press explores the subjects of medicine and public health in twentieth-century art by African Americans. 

Eileen Gillooly

Executive Director, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University

Eileen Gillooly, PhD, is Executive Director of the Heyman Center, and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. She is the author of Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1999) and co-edited the volumes Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (2007) and Contemporary Dickens (2009).

Brian Hurwitz

Professor Emeritus, King's College London

Brian Hurwitz is a medical practitioner and former director of the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King's College London, where he is Professor Emeritus.

Deborah Jenson

Director, Health Humanities Lab, Duke University

Deborah Jenson co-directs the Duke Haiti Humanities Lab (with Laurent Dubois), focusing her work on the history of cholera in Haiti and the Caribbean, and mental health issues among survivors of the Haiti earthquake. Her other research areas focus on traumatic stress, cognition and culture and the ethnic identities of African slaves in 18th century Saint-Dominique. She also serves as a Co-Convener of the DIBS/FHI Neurohumanities Research Group. In the summer, she directs Duke in Paris. Her most recent books are a literary history of the Haitian Revolution, called "Beyond the Slave Narrative" (2011, paperback Feb. 2012) and a volume on the global legacies of psychoanalysis: "Unconscious Dominions" (with Anderson and Keller, 2011). Earlier work includes "Trauma and Its Representations," "Sarah (A Colonial Novella" (with Kadish) and "The Haiti Issue" of Yale French Studies. She is writing a book of essays, "Mimesis from Marx to Mirror Neurons." Current collaborative book projects include a biography of Dessalines, a volume of the letters of Toussaint Louverture, and an edition of an 18th century Creole opera.

Anders Juhl Langscheidel Rasmussen

Associate Professor of Narrative Medicine, University of Southern Denmark

Anders Juhl Langscheidel Rasmussen is coordinator of and co-teacher in all courses of Narrative Medicine at SDU; director of “Narrative Medicine” in the project Uses of Literature: The Social Dimensions of Literature, led by Rita Felski, Niels Bohr Professor at SDU (2016-2021); and founder (2017-) and head of steering committee for Nordic Network for Narratives in Medicine. He has published articles in Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, Journal of Research in Sickness and Society, Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly and BMJ Medical Humanities. He has edited an anthology in Danish [Read, Write and Heal. Perspectives on Narrative Medicine] at University Press of Southern Denmark (2017) and is currently co-editing a new anthology which is published in Danish and in English [Narrative Medicine in Education and Practice] with contributions from Rita Charon, Ann Jurecic, Ronald Schleifer, Arthur Frank, Rishi Goyal, and Danish researchers. Anders received his PhD in Danish literature from University of Copenhagen.<o:p></o:p>

Michael Klein

Professor and Director of the Cohen Center for the Humanities, James Madison University

Michael Klein is an STS scholar, professor, and director of the Cohen Center for the Humanities. His research interests include the configuration and representation of science and technology in popular culture, the cultural and scientific implications of new medical imaging technologies and visualization in medicine, and the development of professional communication pedagogy.  

John McGowan

John W. and Anna H. Hanes Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina

John McGowan, PhD, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of Graduate Studies as well as the Institute of Arts and Humanities at UNC Chapel Hill. His work and writings combine philosophy, political theory, and cultural criticism. He has won numerous awards for teaching and is the author/editor of numerous books including Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics (2002) and American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time (2007).

Nolwazi Mkhwanazi

Professor of Anthropology, University of Pretoria

Nolwazi Mkhwanazi is Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Pretoria. She joined the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS) in September 2021. Prior to this (2017-2021), she was the Director of the Medical Humanities program at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), University of the Witwatersrand. Nolwazi is interested in issues relating to life course, kinship and care. While she has also done research on ageing and care, her main focus has been on young people, reproduction, sexuality and gender. In the last 5 years she has been working more broadly with young people regarding issues of sexuality, sex education and sexual health interventions. In this work, her fieldwork sites span across Southern Africa including Botswana and Eswatini, and she has collaborated with people in range of disciplines including fine art, biomedical sciences, public health, demography and other social science disciplines.

Kathryn Rhine

Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology, University of Kansas

Kathryn A. Rhine is a medical anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Kansas. She is editor (with John M. Janzen, Glenn Adams and Heather Aldersey) of Medical Anthropology in Global Africa and her work has appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, Africa Today, and Ethnos.