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In recent years in the US, increasing workforce diversity has become a priority in health care and other industries. Many companies, including Fortune 500s, now recognize that having a diverse workforce improves both business and the bottom line—indeed, diversity is key to organizational excellence. In this Medical Center Hour, a panel of physicians explores whether UVA Health System's growing diversity can add value in a very different way: can our organization's greater diversity be a lever to mitigate bias in these increasingly fraught times?
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Understanding and responding to patients' complex health needs and challenges requires physicians--and all healthcare providers--to think creatively. Knowledge and information are not enough. We must prepare future physicians to think differently and to be mindful of how they think. But future physicians must also possess the skills of a creative artist, because, for many doctors on the clinical frontlines, medicine is a science-using creative art.
In this Medical Center Hour, emergency medicine physician, medical educator, and fiction writer Jay Baruch argues that necessary transformations in medicine and medical education will demand new interdisciplinary skills and methods--and essential contributions from artists, writers, designers, and humanities scholars.
The Moore Lecture of the School of Medicine
Dying in America is very different now from half a century ago. Before World War II, death usually occurred at home, often with no medical intervention. But with the bioscientific and medical advances that began in the 1950's, death became medicalized. In hospitals, it became possible to extend life. Often, patients were cured who would otherwise have died, but many endured protracted deaths in which suffering from treatment was worse than suffering from their fatal illness. Through the last decades of the 20th century, the medical and legal professions, medical ethicists, and the public began to consider ways to limit treatment, even to hasten death. It became generally accepted that all patients have the right to refuse life-sustaining treatment. Now, five U.S. states recognize physician-assisted suicide.
In this Medical center hour, physician and former New England Journal of Medicine editor-in-chief Marcia Angell traces the history of these changes, then inquires into where we stand now on dying--and where we go from here.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
Tuberculosis continues to be one of the world's most deadly infectious diseases, killing almost two million people each year. In this Medical Center Hour, historian Christian McMillen explores TB's stubborn staying power by examining key aspects of the disease—including the rise of drug resistance and TB's resurgence with the HIV/AIDS epidemic—and detailing global efforts to control it since 1900.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
There's much mythology surrounding eating disorders. Myth: these are time-imited illnesses that resolve when a woman leaves adolescence. Myth: only women experience eating disorders. In a society that reveres bodily thinness and now also celebrates the extremely "fit" body, at once lean and overtly muscular, an estimated 25 to 30 million Americans currently suffer from an eating disorder. Most eating disorders look nothing like the stereotypes suggested by sensational media coverage. The afflicted include men and women of all ages and all ethnicities. And so alongside this country's well-publicized obesity epidemic rages another, quite invisible epidemic of eating disorders. This Medical Center Hour addresses eating disorders and related questions from three perspectives. Speakers include a UVA student in recovery, a parent and national advocate, and the coordinator of the prevention program at UVA's Women's Center. What role does family play in eating disorders? How as health professionals do we ensure that patients get the best treatment? What treatments are most effective? How can we, health professionals and laypersons alike, best support someone who is suffering? What resources are available at UVA and how do we get involved?
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Women's Center, UVA
"Germs have always traveled. the problem now is they can travel with the speed of a jet plane." So said physician and medical historian Howard Markel in recent days, commenting on the spread of Ebola outside West Africa. This Medical center hour takes stock of the rapidly evolving Ebola epidemic and the concomitant rise in global health security concerns. What is known of this unusual virus and the life-threatening hemorrhagic fever it triggers? How are sociopolitical and cultural conditions and healthcare infrastructural inadequacies in West Africia and elsewhere hindering medical and public health response? How are governmental and health care institutions in the U.S. responding as cases erupt outside West Africia? And, looking ahead, what are the prospects for vaccine development and fast-track clinical trials?
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Center for Global Health
Patients sometimes complain that they are neither heard by nor really known to their doctors especially, perhaps, subspecialists to whom they've been referred for particular procedures and fear that, as a result, they may receive substandard care. Similarly, in fast paced practice, some physicians, including said subspecialists, may find it difficult to know their patients as persons. Cardiologist Joseph Gascho M.D. met these challenges for himself and his patients by devising ways he could hear and know the persons in his care through the media of photography and poetry. This Medical Center Hour examines doctors' use of the arts to improve the care that patients receive. Dr. Gascho describes three projects that have helped him to bridge the patienthood personhood gulf, enabling him to better understand his patients as individuals and to give them whole person care. He is joined by physician Julia Connelly M.D. for whom photography has become a way to bring care and connection with nature to elderly persons, including nursing home residents.
Anthropologist, activist, and priest Roshi Joan Halifax is the founder and head teacher of the Buddhist monastery, Upaya Zen Center. Seventeen years ago at Upaya, she pioneered a new form of bedside contemplative care known as "Being with Dying," which has since helped to illuminate and change the psychosocial, ethical, and spiritual care of the dying. Halifax's newest work probes what she calls five "edge states" of how we become involved with our fellow beings: altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement. In this Bice Memorial Lecture, she explores the risks and the opportunities for courage and compassion that persons in the helping professions encounter "at the edge."
Bice Lecture, Co-presented with the School of Nursing, UVA
In this Medical Center Hour, Ellen Ficklen, the former editor of "Narrative Matters," takes us behind the scenes at Health Affairs to probe the close working relationship between authors and editors as manuscripts are sculpted and polished into essays that surgeon/author Atul Gawande describes as "some of health care's most stunning writing."
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Among the COVID-19 pandemic's lessons is an increased awareness of the hazards of old age. But only a fraction of that risk is biological. At a moment in history when most of us will live into old age, we've created a world that's almost entirely focused on childhood and adulthood. It's time now to define, design, and empower this new, nearly universal elderhood. In this Medical Center Hour, geriatrician and writer Louise Aronson draws on her clinical experience and creative abilities to reimagine and advocate for old age not as a disease but as a vital phase of being human, with implications for social and community life, technology, geroscience, and healthcare. How shall we now approach elderhood?
Koppaka Family Foundation Lecture in Health Humanities
In this Medical center hour, prize-winning writer Leslie Jamison inquires into the phenomenon of empathy. It may be something more fraught then we often imagine it to be. Empathy isn't just an instinctive reaction but a more complicated blend of intuition and decision. And it's not neccessarily an unequivocal good. It can mislead. It can exhaust. Ms. Jamison draws on her experiences as a standardized patient, working with and observing student doctors getting "trained" in the practice of empathy, as well as her experiences as a journalist, inhabiting a vexed state of empathy for her subjects, to consider a variety of perspectives on what makes for good empathy and what good it can do.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
The caregiver—whether a family member pressed into service or an underpaid home-care aide—is a representative figure of our time. This status is paradoxical because actual caregivers (so often female) do their work largely out of sight and almost in secret. It is an uncanny representative figure whom we do not see.
Writer and scholar David Morris spent over a decade as caregiver for his late wife, Ruth, a medical librarian who in her mid-fifties began to show signs of dementia, most likely earlier-onset Alzheimer’s disease. In this Medical Center, Morris describes his experience but also uses his personal caregiving as a fulcrum for opening up larger questions about what biomedicine often overlooks in its molecular vision of illness. Desire is the neglected force that Morris sees as basic to illness, and it is the role of desire in illness that he seeks to clarify. Desire, it turns out, also offers an unanticipated common ground where health-care professionals—caregivers too in their medical role—may meet with patients and families in mutual, richer understanding.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
In 1990, University of Pittsburgh Public Health Professor John C. Cutler delivered to the university's archives thousands of pages of documents and photographs about an unpublished research project that he ran in Guatemala for the U.S. and Guatemalan governments between 1946 and 1948. Duly cataloged, the files then sat in the library until the mid 2000s, when historian Susan Reverby began to read them as part of her book project on the Tuskegee syphilis studies.
Who knew that the infamous U.S. Public Health Service Study of Untreated Syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama, had an off shore successor? Unlike Tuskegee, the Guatemala studies led by Dr. Cutler involved actual inoculation of sexually transmitted diseases and the paying of sex workers to transmit disease. Unsuspecting and unconsenting prisoners, soldiers, mental patients, and sex workers participated; only some were treated if and when they became infected.
In 2009, Professor Reverby returned to the Pittsburgh archive, and in 2010 she wrote up her findings on the Guatemala project. She shared her unpublished article with the late David Sencer, former director of the Centers for Disease Conrol (CDC), who gave the article to the current CDC leadership. The CDC prepared its own report and sent it, along with the Reverby article, up the chain of command to the White House. On Oct. 1, 2010, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton apologized to the Guatemalan government and President Obama telephoned then President Colom in Guatemala to explain. In the spotlight of worldwide media attention, presidential commissions in both countries undertook investigations, and survivors of the study filed suit against the U.S. government. The Guatemala study and its aftermath have urgently renewed debate about the ethics of clinical research involving human participants, especially research carried out with vulnerable populations and in the global arena.
In this Medical Center Hour, Susan Reverby discusses how her discovery of the Guatemala study files set in motion international investigative and diplomatic processes and what we can learn from this ethically immoral use of medical science. Bioethicist John Arras, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, will comment on the commission's investigation and its 2011 report, Ethically impossible: STD research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948.
Physician-author Lisa Sanders, who writes the popular "Diagnosis" column in The New York Times Magazine and "Think Like a Doctor" blog for the New York Times, probes the crucial exchanges between doctor and patient that are at the heart of every medical mystery and its solution.
The Koppaka Family Foundation Lecture in Medical Humanities
In 1943, Albert Schatz, a young PhD student at New Jersey's Rutgers Agricultural College, was working on a wartime project testing bacteria from farmyard soil when he discovered streptomycin, a new antibiotic that was the first effective drug against the global killer tuberculosis. Schatz’s professor, Selman Waksman, claimed all credit for the discovery, calling Schatz a mere bench worker, and secretly enriched himself with royalties once the drug was patented by pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck. Schatz fought back in what was one of the most vicious battles ever for credit of a major scientific discovery. Schatz won the title of "co- discoverer" and a share of the royalties, but, in 1952, Waksman alone was awarded a Nobel Prize. Schatz disappeared into academic obscurity.
This Medical Center Hour features journalist Peter Pringle, whose recent book Experiment Eleven probes this gripping, scandalous story and its diverse global repercussions— for scientific inquiry and mentoring, for research ethics, and for the evolution of Big Pharma.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
January 23, 2019
Joe Richman
Since 1996, the Radio Diaries project has been giving people audio recorders and working with them to report on their own lives and histories. Collaborating with teens and octogenarians, persons with chronic and terminal illness, prisoners and prison guards, gospel preachers and bra saleswomen, the famous and the unknown, the project tells extraordinary stories of ordinary life. With stories aired on NPR, BBC, This American Life, and its own podcast, Radio Diaries has pioneered a new form of citizen journalism and, along the way, garnered every major award in broadcast journalism. This Medical Center Hour welcomes Radio Diaries’ founding director, Joe Richman, to share stories and draw parallels with health care practice, where, daily, clinicians traffic in the “extraordinary stories of ordinary life.”
The Edward W. Hook Lecture in Medicine and the Arts / Medical Grand Rounds
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine, UVA
When the First Nations of Big River and Ahtahkakoop in Canada's Saskatchewan province realized they had an HIV epidemic within their rural communities, their leadership and health centers rallied community members to determine the social and structural issues behind the epidemic. One of the driving factors proved to be injection drug use. Big River and Ahtahkakoop then developed culturally competent, community-based care to address the intertwined issues of HIV, hepatitis C, and substance use. In this presentation, spokespersons from these two communities describe how they took on these epidemics and discuss the solutions that have worked for them. What can other communities struggling similarly with substance abuse and related infectious disease outbreaks learn from these First Nations' grassroots responses? Are there lessons here for communities in Virginia, where, on average, three people die each day from opioid overdose?
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine and the Center for Global Health, in conjunction with the conference, "Best Practices in Community Mobilization in Response to Substance Use and Related Epidemics"
Emily Levine does for science what Jon Stewart does for news: she critiques it, she makes it relevant, she makes it funny. She brings her experiences as a patient in search of a diagnosis and a curative path to physical health and notes that in order to regain metaphysical health, she had to enter a universe of randomness, uncertainty, and turbulence. She reasons that only quantum physics and chaos theory can make sense of this new universe, and possibly of medicine today.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Fred Frith Trio:
Fred Frith, guitar
Jason Hoopes, bass
Jordan Glenn, drums
Special Guests: Susana Santos Silva, trumpet
Heike Liss, video
Friday, October 4, 2019 8:00 pm
Old Cabell Hall Auditorium University of Virginia
The Fred Frith Trio began life almost by accident in 2013. A couple of low key local gigs gave rise to a European tour, a debut record on Intakt, and then another tour a couple of years later. By now the group has created an identity that seems to revolve around memories of a bygone psychedelic era filtered through the lens of razor-sharp improvisation. Whether this will remain the prevalent focus remains to be seen. Their last Intakt CD, Closer to the Ground, has been described as “a gripping piece of spontaneous timelessness,” “a vital statement from a singular artist and his inventive crew,” and “a magical, transcendent world.” The trio regularly cooperates with musical guests such as trumpeter Susana Santos Silva or saxophonist Lotte Anker, and visual artist Heike Liss.
Fred Frith is a songwriter, composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist best known for the reinvention of the electric guitar that began with Guitar Solos in 1974. He learned his craft as both improviser and composer playing in rock bands, notably Henry Cow, and creating music in the recording studio. Much of his compositional output has been commissioned by choreographers and filmmakers, but his work has also been performed by Ensemble Modern, Hieronymus Firebrain, Arditti Quartet, Robert Wyatt, Bang on a Can All Stars, Concerto Köln, and Rova Sax Quartet, among quite a few others. Fred enthusiastically records and performs all over the place with icons of contemporary music, younger players you may never have heard of, and everyone in between. He is the subject of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel’s award-winning documentary film Step Across the Border.
Jordan Glenn, drums, spent his formative years in Oregon drawing cartoons, taking dance classes from his aunt, and putting on plays with his sisters. As he got older, he began making movies with his friends and studying lots of jazz, classical, and rock music. In 2006, he relocated to the Bay Area where he has since worked closely with Fred Frith, William Winant, Zeena Parkins, Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose, John Schott, Dominique Leone, Lisa Mezzacappa, Karl Evangelista, Michael Coleman, and the bands Jack O’ The Clock, Arts & Sciences, Beep!, tUnE-yArDs, and the Oakland Active Orchestra. Jordan leads and conducts the long-standing trio Wiener Kids—and its ten piece expansion, The Wiener Kids Family Band—and directs the conduction ensemble Beak.
Jason Hoopes, bass, was born and raised in the mountains of Northern California. He began teaching himself to play guitar and bass in high school after discovering thrash-metal, and eventually found himself at Mills College where he met Jordan Glenn and studied with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, Zeena Parkins, and Joëlle Léandre. Since graduating from Mills, Jason has become a highly sought after bassist in the Bay Area’s diverse and explosive music scene. Primarily recognized for his work with the critically acclaimed avant- rock band Jack O’ The Clock, as well as with Annie Lewandowski’s powerdove and Dominique Leone, he also improvises in a wide range of contexts.
Susana Santos Silva is a Portuguese trumpet player, improviser, and composer based in Stockholm, Sweden. In the last years, she has been considered by the international press as one of the strongest emerging voices in contemporary jazz and improvised music, “one of the most exciting improvisers in the world” (Downbeat). With a singular approach/voice that comes out of a comprehensive spectrum of influences, from classical and contemporary music to jazz and textural sound art, she is interested in stretching the boundaries of the instrument and exploring new ways of expression within music. Her music has been described as “startling, intoxicating, ecstatic, stoically intense, beautiful, overwhelming, mesmerizing, innovative, bold and creative.” She leads her projects Impermanence and Life and Other Transient Storms and co-leads duos with Kaja Draksler and Torbjörn Zetterberg—also in trio with Hampus Lindwall, Child of Illusion and Hearth. In 2018, she released her first solo album, All the Rivers, on Clean Feed Records. Much in demand, she has played, among many others, with Fred Frith, Evan Parker, Joëlle Léandre, Mat Maneri, Craig Taborn, Paul Lovens, Mats Gustafsson, and Hamid Drake.
Heike Liss has been developing and refining tools that allow her to mix and digitally draw over personal video footage in response to and in dialogue with improvised live music. Drawing Sound is a collaboration with her partner and traveling companion Fred Frith. Together they have performed with musical improvisers such as Lotte Anker, Ikue Mori, Okkyung Lee, Chris Cutler, Susana Santos Silva, and Shelley Hirsch among others. Heike also performs live visuals with skratchklang, her duo with violinist/composer Thea Farhadian. Heike takes her cues from the people and the world around her and works in a variety of media, including video, photography, drawing, sculpture, site specific installation, and public intervention. Her award-winning work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and at film and music festivals. She has collaborated with choreographers Sonsherée Giles and François Verret; musicians Ellen Fullman, GAW, Marcus Weiss, Caroline Penwarden, and Theresa Wong; multi-media artists Ellen Lake, Nomi Talisman, and Michael Trigilio; painter Soffia Saemundsdottir; and poet Lyn Hejinian, to name a few. She lives and works in Oakland and Basel and teaches Transdisciplinary Art at the Universidad Austral de Chile.
On 13 June 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down patents on the hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (BRCA) genes. One company, Utah-based Myriad Genetics, claimed ownership of those genes and both marketed and processed the test for them. Myriad now controls the genetic data of all the persons tested for BRCA.
In the wake of the 9-0 ruling against Myriad, there's considerable debate about who owns this genetic information and who should control it. Should it be held by a private company or in a commons? Should control rest with the BRCA+ community? "Free the Data," a new grass-roots campaign, brings voices of BRCA+ individuals and biomedical investigators alike into this debate. In this Medical Center Hour, documentary filmmaker Joanna Rudnick, together with law and medical experts from UVA, discuss what's at stake in freeing the data.
Co-presented with the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life, the Department of Public Health Sciences, and the Cancer Center's Breast Care Program, UVA
The Hollingsworth Lecture in Practical Ethics
Alice Dreger’s newest book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, had its origins in social and scientific controversies having to do with the politics of sex, especially social and medical treatment of so-called intersex individuals. Ms. Dreger’s investigations into this aspect of human identity and intersex rights engaged her with both sides of a heated debate and also with issues of freedom and justice in science. As she says, “Science and social justice require each other to be healthy, and both are critically important to human freedom. . . . [P]ursuit of evidence is probably the most pressing moral imperative of our time. All of our work as scholars, activities, and citizens of democracy depends on it. Yet it seems that, especially when questions of human identity are concerned, we’ve built up a system in which scientists and social justice advocates are fighting in ways that poison the soil on which both depend. It’s high time we think about this mess we’ve created, about what we’re doing to each other and to democracy itself.”
In this Medical Center Hour, Ms. Dreger addresses these concerns—for science, justice, and academic freedom—at a time when pursuit of knowledge can clash with established interests, worldviews, and ideas about social progress.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
Columbine. Virginia Tech. Ft. Hood. Huntsville. Tucson. Aurora. Newtown. The Navy Yard. Charleston. Roseburg. Gun violence, including a relentless raft of mass shootings, is epidemic today in the U.S., threatening individual safety and public health and wellbeing. The grim tally for 2015, says the Washington Post, is 294 mass shootings in 274 days. Many shooters are said to have undiagnosed or undertreated mental illness in their background.
How does psychopathology contribute to violent behavior, particularly involving firearms, over a person's life course and in the social environment? How accurate and useful are clinicians’ predictions of violence in their patients? What is an appropriate role for clinicians as “gun gatekeepers” and for mental health services generally, as part of a public-health solution to gun violence? This Medical Center Hour reviews research related to these urgent questions and explores implications for clinicians and other mental-health stakeholders.
Co-presented with the Institute for Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy and the School of Law, UVA
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
This illustrated lecture traces the life and work of Sydney architect Harry Seidler (1923-2006), his key role in bringing Modernism and Bauhaus principles to Australia, identifies his distinctive hand, and explores long-lasting creative collaborations with leading visionaries of the 20th century, including with architects Marcel Breuer and Oscar Niemeyer; artists Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Norman Carlberg, Charles Perry, Frank Stella, and Lin Utzon; engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, photographer Max Dupain, and developer Dick Dusseldorp, founder of Lend Lease Corporation. In almost sixty years, Seidler has realized over 120 of his designs—from houses to mixed-use multi-story towers and prominent government commissions—all over Australia, as well as in Austria, France, Israel, Italy, Mexico, and Hong Kong.
Apart from the architect’s creative achievements, the lecture will reveal a story of Seidler’s life, a fascinating journey from his motherland of Austria to England, Canada, the United States, Brazil, and finally, to Australia, where he settled in 1948, eventually becoming the country’s most accomplished architect. Among projects to be discussed: Rose Seidler House (1950), Harry and Penelope Seidler House (1967), and Australia Square (1967) in Sydney; Edmund Barton Building (Canberra, 1974), Australian Embassy (Paris, 1977), Hong Kong Club (HK, 1984), Shell Headquarters (Melbourne, 1989) and residential complex Wohnpark Neue Donau (Vienna, 1998).
At a time of sweeping transitions in health care, medical students and young physicians are eager for guidance as to how best to apply their knowledge and skills in caring for patients. In clinical settings, and especially in primary care, who might be the best role models for young trainees to emulate? What skills and traits do the best clinicians use to create healing relationships with patients? How do clinicians become "healers" -that is, practitioners effective in making the patient-professional relationship itself have active therapeutic potential? Professor Larry Churchill and colleagues at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine have examined these matters, interviewing both clinicians and patients on the vital question of what actually makes for a therapeutic encounter, even in the context of a stressed and changing health care system.
In this Medical Center Hour, Professor Churchill will present his studies' findings as a prelude to disscussion of the implications for medical ethics and medical education and for establishing truly "patient-centered" practices.
The design of sustainable, just, and economically feasible environments for human health and well-being is one of the most urgent needs of the 21st century on a global scale. Aging populations, environmental pollution, rapid urbanization, increased poverty, rising health care costs, the need for preventive medicine, and new developments in social and medical science have created a host of design challenges and opportunities. In this Medical Center Hour, Tim Beatley and Reuben Rainey, co-directors of the UVA School of Architecture's new Center for Design and Health, explore ways designers and planners are meeting these challenges at a variety of scales, ranging from patient-centered health care facilities to healthy neighborhoods and cities.
When documentary filmmaker Kathy Leichter moved back into her childhood home after her mother's suicide, she discovered a hidden box of audiotapes. Sixteen years passed before she had the courage to delve into this trove, but there she unearthed what her mother had recorded about every aspect of her life--from the joys and challenges of her marriage to a state senator to her son's estrangement , as well as the highs and lows of living with bipolar disorder. Here one day is Ms. Leichter's emotionally candid film about a woman coping with mental illness, her family relationships, and the ripple effects of her suicide on those she loved. In this Medical center hour, Ms. Leichter offers her extraordinary award-winning film, speaks about the transformative nature of story, and shows how Here one day is helping to dissolve mental health stigma and to educate and support persons and families in communities and educational institutions across the country.
"In this talk I will examine the idea of historical practices such as reconstruction, archiving, reenactment, and counter factual history (among others) within the context of architecture and landscape. Rather than simply forms of historical realism, I see these practices as possible techniques of agitation, speculation, and provocation in contemporary architectural practice. I'll briefly examine these practices in a few iconic examples from the history of architecture. Following this, I’ll discuss ideas of historical practices through a series of my own projects. My own work tends to further entangle the above forms of historical practice with socio-natural themes, the history of degraded environments, the history of urban radicalism, and the concerns of a future, liberatory mode of subjectivity."
Dean's Forum Lecture, Campbell Hall
We live in times when empathy—the ability to imagine how it feels to be inside the skin of another—seems to be in short supply. As a writer of poetry and memoir, Mark Doty believes that literature is one of the most powerful tools we have to come close to the subjectivity of another person. The practice of medicine, too, is a work of knowing—of learning who someone is, what they need, and how they might be healed. In this Medical Center Hour, Mr. Doty explores these ideas through writings that grew out of the crisis years of the AIDS epidemic in this country and in recent work concerned with love, time, and citizenship in the human community.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Creative Writing Program, Department of English