Invited by the department of History of the University of Cincinnati, Dr William Chase gives the talk: “Stalinism in a Spanish Key: Moscow, Madrid, Mexico City”.
Lecture Date: April 27, 2010
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The rest of the talk is available in our YouTube Channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/TaftResearchCenter
All events are free and open to the public. Click for more information and a schedule.
Dr. Wendy Kline, Associate Professor of the Department of History of the University of Cincinnati gives the talk "Childbirth Made Difficult: Raising Consciousness on the Delivery Table"
Lecture date: April 23, 2010
Please, visit the taft research Center website: http://www.artsci.uc.edu/taft/
The rest of the talk is in our Youtube Channel at:http://www.youtube.com/user/TaftResearchCenter
"Because it brings the ethics of care to the forefront of cultural consciousness, Schiavo is one of a growing number of high-profile medical cases that might benefit from the wisdom of the medical humanities," notes Dean Valerie Hardcastle (Philosophy) of the College of Arts and Sciences.
"As medical treatments become more sophisticated, doctors and lawyers confront complex ethical questions. Scholars working in the medical humanities aim to weigh in on these crucial medical and scientific matters," she explains.
The Taft Research Center is proud to launch a new spring lecture series on the medical humanities devoted to these and other questions, including "the sociocultural aspects of health and disease and their meanings, as well as biological factors," remarks Professor Wendy Kline (History), who lectures on April 23.
The series begins Friday, April 16 at 2:00 pm with "A Critical Evaluation of Culture, Race, and Cultural Competence in Health Care" by Professor Jennifer Malat (Sociology) and features three subsequent Friday afternoon lectures (see schedule below).
The lecture series is sponsored by the Taft Center Medical Humanities Research Group, an affiliation of scholars of anthropology, English, history, philosophy, and sociology who wish to examine the import of the humanities disciplines for medical research and practice. Dean Hardcastle observes that the medical humanities are necessarily cross-disciplinary because "they grapple with real-world questions. If you isolate them, you don’t get a complete answer."
The Taft Center Medical Humanities Research Group invites lecturers, arranges colloquia, writes and submits grants to the NEH and NIH, and aims to design curricula for an interdisciplinary and cross-college program in medical humanities at the University of Cincinnati.
Dean Hardcastle is developing a certificate program for undergraduates interested in health professions that will provide tools to "help understand the complex intellectual issues associated with practicing medicine today."
The general public as well as humanities scholars and medical and scientific practitioners are encouraged to attend the lecture series. As Dean Hardcastle notes, "at some point any of us might need to consider a do-not-resuscitate form or discuss medical issues with a person of a religious or educational background different than his or her own."
Whether the issue is end-of-life care, culturally-specific meanings of health and disease, or gender bias in scientific protocols, "medical humanities touch everybody’s lives."
- Suzanne Warren, University of Cincinnati
April 16, 2010
Jennifer Malat, Associate Professor, Sociology
A Critical Evaluation of Culture, Race, and Cultural Competence in Health Care
April 23, 2010
Wendy Kline, Associate Professor, History
Childbirth Made Difficult: Raising Consciousness on the Delivery Table
April 30, 2010
Jeff Jacobson, Assistant Professor, Anthropology and Family Medicine
Carried Away: Sociocultural Dimensions of Dissociative Distress in Two Central American Communities
May 7, 2010
Lisa Meloncon, Assistant Professor, English and Comparative Literature
Articulating Episteme: Vernacular Medical Texts in Early Modern England
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Please, visit the Taft Research Center website: http://www.artsci.uc.edu/taft/
Invited by the Romance Languages Department of the University of Cincinnati, Professor Javier Blasco (University of Valladolid Spain) gives the talk "Anonimity and literary creation in the Spanish Golden Age"
Several major works of Spanish Early Modern literature were anonymous. The lecture explores the social and textual implications of anonymity and draws from several disciplines, including forensic linguistics.
The rest of the talk is available in our Youtube Channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/TaftResearchCenter
In this talk Professor Dreher (University of Nebraska – Lincoln) will speak on her personal and community responses to performances and autobiographical writings by Black women celebrities including Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, and others.
Lecture Date: April 7, 2010
Dr.Dreher highlights how the autobiographical "I" of the black woman celebrity connects with the collective black literary community by narrating her journey of harrowing familial persecution and communal expulsion, mean poverty, embarrassing insecurity, betrayal, and the threat of violence in conjunction with racism and sexism. Her work maintains that the black celebrity autobiographical narrative coexists on the continuum of black written expression as it has been practiced throughout history by black women. The discussion of Mary Wilson's autobiography Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme (Motown's stellar girl group The Supremes), for example, can stand with Toni Morrison'sSula, Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Gloria Naylor's Women of Brewster Place. Wilson examines the dynamics of friendship between young women in the entertainment industry, specifically Motown, just as Morrison and Walker do via their stories about Nel and Sula and Shug Avery, Celie, and Sophia respectively in their own communities. The late Eartha Kitt joins Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)as well in her critique of intra-racial dynamics in the black family and community. An examination of Kitt's autobiographies brings to relief the practice of verbal, sexual, and physical abuse within the black community, just as Morrison does in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Paradise.
By talking about themselves in the literary realm, black female celebrities dance with other black women who, throughout history, have used literature, in particular the genre of autobiography, to choreograph themselves on the stage of U.S. history. Overall, these autobiographies joins the life-writing as expressed by black women such as Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
