Literature and Medicine

Katharine Cheston is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University. Her PhD, which combines literary and qualitative methods, is a critical interrogation of so-called "medically unexplained symptoms" and focuses particularly on experiences of shame and shaming.

Megan Crowley-Matoka is Associate Professor in the departments of Medical Education and Anthropology at Northwestern University, where she directs the MA Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. As a medical anthropologist, her research explores the culture of medicine, with particular interest how patients, medical professionals, and policymakers take action and make meaning in the face of clinical and moral uncertainty. She is the author of Domesticating Organ Transplant: Familial Sacrifice and National Aspiration in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2016).

Daniel Direkoglu recently completed his PhD at the University of Toronto's English Department. His research focuses on some of the ways American writers represent physical pain as a lived experience that is shaped by a number of cultural factors, including systemic racism, gender roles, religion, and class. His article, "American Agony: Richard Wright's Language of Pain in Black Boy (American Hunger)," is forthcoming in the next issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly (Fall 2023). He is currently working on a book-length study of the plethora of ways physical pain is portrayed in American novels.

Ann Jurecic is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. Her first book, Illness as Narrative (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), charts the emergence of personal writing about illness in the twentieth century. Changing Minds: Women and the Political Essay, 1960–2000 explores the essay's transformations (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). She has coauthored three editions of Habits of the Creative Mind (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2023), a guide for essayists. Professor Jurecic has also written literary book reviews for The Lancet.

Sal Marx (they/them) is an artist, advocate, and educator working at the intersection of health care justice and the arts. Their multimedia art, workshops, and installations explore borderlands of illness, pain, and dis/ease, and the relationship between gender and self in a pathologized body. Sal has an MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. They live with their cat Sisyphus on Bainbridge Island, WA.

Susannah B. Mintz is Professor of English at Skidmore College. Her books include four scholarly volumes on disability and literature, most recently The Disabled Detective: Sleuthing Disability in Contemporary Crime Fiction and Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body. She is the co-editor of four collections on disability issues, including A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century, with D. Christopher Gabbard, and Disability Experiences, with G. Thomas Couser Placing Disability: Personal Stories of Embodied Geography (co-edited with Gregory Fraser) and Hypochondria in Symptom and Story are forthcoming.

Javier Moscoso is Research Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). His Pain: A Cultural History was published in 2012 by Palgrave-Macmillan, and the French edition received the French booksellers' Libr'à nous prize for the best history book of 2015. The text was considered an example of cultural history and medical humanities. His latest book, The Arc of Feeling: A History of the Swing (Reaktion Books, 2023), explores the similarity between rituals and mythologies of oscillation throughout history.

Wade Paul is a Wolastoqey (Maliseet) First Nations scholar and member of St. Mary's First Nation in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He received a bachelor's and master's degree in Anthropology from the University of Western Ontario. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Indigenous history from Concordia University in Montréal, Quebec.

Maria Vaccarella is Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Bristol. She works on the intersection of literature and medicine, and she is a member of the steering committee of the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science at Bristol. Her research explores the genre of illness narratives, with a special focus on non-linear and non-triumphalistic plots. She is currently writing a monograph, Biomedicine in Contemporary Western Literature. Doctoring Stories (Palgrave), on what narrative theory can learn from illness narratives. She is also interested in narrative medicine, critical disability studies, narrative bioethics, comparative literature...