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Does some aspect of our personality survive bodily death? Long a philosophical and theological question, in the 20th century this became the subject of scientific research. Fifty years ago, in 1967, Ian Stevenson, then chair of UVA's Department of Psychiatry, created a research unit—now named the Division of Perceptual Studies—to study what, if anything, of the human personality survives after death. Dr. Stevenson's own research investigated hundreds of accounts of young children who claimed to recall past lives.
In this Medical Center Hour, faculty from the Division of Perceptual Studies highlight the unit's work since its founding, including studies of purported past lives, near-death experiences, and mind-brain interactions in phenomena such as deep meditation, veridical out-of-body experiences, deathbed visions, apparent communication from deceased persons, altered states of consciousness, and terminal lucidity in persons with irreversible brain damage. As the division enters its second half-century, what are its research priorities and partnerships?
History of the Health Sciences Lecture
Co-presented with Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library and the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, UVA
Javon Bennett was born in 1990 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and lives in Hampton, Virginia. Beginning in 2020, he started working as an organizer for New Virginia Majority on food insecurity, environmental racism, and housing discrimination issues. His work allows him to observe how the coal piers in Norfolk and Newport News impact the daily lives of residents.
Track 1: In this June 2023 testimony to the EPA, Bennett discusses how coal dust settles on windows, children’s clothing, garden beds, and cars in Lambert’s Point and the East End of Newport News. He discusses his own experience struggling to breathe during a hot summer day canvassing in Lambert’s Point, as well as the long term health impacts, including chronic asthma and bronchitis, and financial expenses that burden those he has met through his environmental justice work. He urges the EPA to visit these communities to witness these hazards first-hand.
Track 2: In this oral history, Bennett reflects on his experience growing up in the 1990s in Philadelphia and how his experience navigating trash pollution and discrimination within his classroom led him to his organizing work today. After moving to Newport News when his mother started a job at the shipyard, Bennett worked on environmental justice issues and for mutual aid organizations with Tidewater Tenants Rights. This interview includes his reflections on urban violence, houselessness, food insecurity, and the persistent costs of coal dust for residents living near coal piers in the Hampton Roads region.
Invited speaker, John Hessler of the Library of Congress, discusses the use of artificial intelligence for the reconstruction of ceramics and inscriptions in archaeology for the Scholars' Lab speaker series, University of Virginia, Spring 2021. Recorded via Zoom web video communications interface in the presence of a live audience of 60+ attendees.
Keela Boose is an English Professor at Norfolk State University and a self-described “child of historically Black colleges and universities.” Born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1958, Booses’s parents taught Education and Psychology at Grambling State University, Alabama State College, and later, Norfolk State. In this 2023 interview, Boose discusses the mentors who inspired her love of reading. She recalls the social and political contexts of Civil Rights-era Montgomery, Alabama, and her memories growing up in what was then a racially-mixed neighborhood of Campostella Heights in the Southside of Norfolk. Boose pursued college and graduate work at Alcorn State University in Mississippi and at Northern Illinois University. The interview was conducted in her home along the Elizabeth River, which her parents bought in 1966 and she later inherited. In the interview, she describes how sea level rise and the practices of developers buying rights to the water has impacted the shoreline of her neighborhood.
Kim Sudderth is a community leader and advocate for racial justice with the Norfolk branch of the NAACP, and the first Black woman to serve as Vice Chair of the Norfolk Planning Commission, beginning in 2022. She was the Repair Lab’s inaugural Practitioner-in-Residence in 2021. Born in 1971, Sudderth grew up in Norfolk and spent some of her adult years in Virginia Beach before returning home to Norfolk.
Track 1: In this oral history, Sudderth discusses her childhood years growing up on the naval base near Ocean View in Norfolk, and her memories of her mother’s softball league. In her later adult years, Sudderth began advocating for environmental justice cases with Mothers Out Front. Sudderth shares her perspectives on power and change-making, and discusses the connected and widespread issues of housing and the environment, as well as the lessons she has learned through organizing.
Track 2: In this interview Sudderth discusses her experience with a representative of the city in conversation about the proposed downtown Norfolk seawall and the absence of structural mitigations for flooding for the predominantly Black Southside neighborhood, where she resides. Sudderth also addresses Norfolks’ Vision2100 document, a neighborhood planning guide created in response to forecasted sea-level rise and the resulting changes in the city’s geography.
In summer 2013, UVA landscape architecture graduate students Harriett Jameson and Asa Eslocker travelled to Sardinia, Okinawa, and Loma Linda, California, three landscapes with the highest life expectancy in the world, to explore these places' physical, spatial, and material qualities-topography, plant communitites,urban form-and also the personal attachments that seniors in these sites have to their cultural landscapes. The people in these locales have long been studied for their genetics, diets, and recreation habits. But until Ms. Jameson and Mr. Eslocker arrived, no one had inquired into or demonstrated in these settings the critical role of place in healthy longevity. Through study of these distinctive landscapes and the personal stories of elderly residents, the pair arrived at insights that may help communities rethink and redesign public landscapes to cultivate a culture of health and well being that spans infancy through old age.
In this Medical center hour, Ms. Jameson and Mr. Eslocker focus on how place contributes to healthy aging and preview parts of their full-length documentary film, Landscapes of longevity, which will premiere in Charlottesville in November.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Center for Design + Health, School of Architecture, UVA
