HEAL presents: Lunch and Learn

Torments of a Terrifying Gland:
How Medical Humanities Can Improve Prostate Care

A conversation with Dr. Ericka Johnson

Professor of Gender and Society, Linköping University, Sweden

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Biography:

The author of A Cultural Biography of the Prostate (MIT, 2021), Dr. Erika Johnson’s interdisciplinary research combines the best of social studies of science, medical sociology, and feminist science studies.  Her latest work examines medical technologies and the multiple ways in which  artifacts express and highlight the cultural values that shape our lives.

HEAL presents: Lunch and Learn

Transition to Parenthood as a Window for Biopsychosocial Health in Adulthood

A conversation with Dr. Darby Saxbe

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Biography:

Dr. Saxbe has devoted the past decade to studying how the journey into parenthood affects health and relationships for both parents and their children. In this talk, she will present some of her recent studies on parenting – with a focus on fathers – and how new parents undergo changes to their physical and mental health. She will highlight new research on the fathering brain, showing the brain structure changes in men followed from the prenatal into the postpartum period, and that these structural changes are associated with hormones and adjustment to parenthood. She will also emphasize the importance of this program of research for clinical intervention and public policy.

HEAL presents: Lunch and Learn

Quacks, Heroes, and Humans: A Short History of Physicians in Comics and Cartoons

A conversation with Renée Rau

 

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Throughout the modern era physicians have been the subject of satirical cartoons, comic strips, and most recently Graphic Medicine. Ranging from the quack doctor, to post World War II heroes, to everyday people, the image and narratives surrounding ‘the physician’ has changed over time and reflects larger societal issues.

Biography:

Renée A. Rau, a Southern California native, earned a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree at San José State University (SJSU) in December 2020. In 2017, she earned an MA in 20th-century United States history, specializing in women’s and gender history, from Washington State University (WSU). She works as an Information Services Librarian at the Norris Medical Library and liaisons with the Keck School of Medicine. Her current research interests include Graphic Medicine, pathways to health sciences librarianship, and reproductive health information.

George J. Sánchez is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California (USC) and an award-winning scholar of Mexican American history and immigration. He is the author of Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles (Oxford, 1993) and the newly published Boyle Heights: How A Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy (California, 2021).  He was born in Boyle Heights to two immigrant parents from Mexico and is a first-generation college student, receiving his B.A. from Harvard College in 1981 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1989.

 

Folklore & Medicine:

Vernacular Authority and Tellability in

Public Health Discourse

A conversation with Kristiana Willsey

 

Lunch and Learn

Wednesday September 15th, 2021 at 12:00pm-1:00pm

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Kristiana Willsey has a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University and teaches in the Anthropology department at the University of Southern California. Previously, she was a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Publications:

Falling Out of Performance: Pragmatic Breakdown in Veterans’ Storytelling

Fake Vets’ and Viral Lies: Personal Narrative in a Post-Truth Era

At War With Stories: A Vernacular Critique of the Narrative Boom from American Military Veterans

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