Pamela Schaff, MD, PhD is Associate Professor of Medical Education, Family Medicine, and Pediatrics, and Director of the HEAL (Humanities, Ethics, Art, and the Law) Program at the Keck School of Medicine (KSOM) of the University of Southern California (USC). She graduated from Pomona College with a B.A. in English Literature and received her M.D. from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She has practiced pediatrics since completing her residency at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, and previously served as Keck’s Director of the Introduction to Clinical Medicine (ICM) program, Assistant Dean for Curriculum, and Associate Dean for Curriculum.
Dr. Schaff served as Undergraduate Medical Education (UGME) chair for the Group on Educational Affairs (GEA) of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) from 2012-2014, and chaired the GEA’s working group on professional identity formation from 2014-2018. She is a member of the newly formed Association of American Medical College (AAMC) Humanities and Arts Integration Committee, charged with determining and advancing the role of the humanities and arts in medical education and physician development. She is the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in teaching and mentoring. In November 2019, Dr. Schaff successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in Creative Writing and Literature: “Crafting the Unspoken in The Wings of the Dove: Intersubjective Encounters and the ‘Case’ of Milly Theale.”
Erika Wright holds a PhD in English from the University of Southern California. She has appointments as a Lecturer in the English Department (University Park Campus) and as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medical Education at KSOM. She is the Associate Director of the humanities, ethics, arts and law (HEAL) program at USC. Her book, Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2016), examines the rhetoric of disease prevention and health maintenance in works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell. She has contributed entries on health and disease to the Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction (McFarland, 2018) and her articles on medicine and literature, graduate education, and medical professionalism appear in Studies in the Novel, the Midwestern Modern Language Association journal, From Reading to Healing: Teaching Medical Professionalism through Literature (Kent State UP, 2019). Erika has won several teaching awards, and in addition to teaching courses on the British literature survey, Science Fiction, and Women in Literature for the English Department, she brings her expertise in narrative theory and close reading to the Narrative Medicine Workshops she has designed and taught for the HEAL Program.
Abigail Rasminsky received her MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she also studied in the Narrative Medicine program. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, O: The Oprah Magazine, Longreads, Electric Literature, The Forward, The Cut, and Healthline, among other publications. She is a contributing writer at Dance Magazine, where she frequently writes about injury and rehabilitation. A former professional modern dancer, she writes about the body, pain, illness, motherhood and pregnancy. She was a teaching fellow at Columbia and Webster Universities, and has designed and taught creative writing classes for the HEAL program.
Edgar Rivera Colón teaches qualitative research methods in the Narrative Medicine program. Dr. Rivera Colón is a medical anthropologist who trains frontline African American and Latino/a HIV/AIDS activists in the use of ethnographic research methods in developing community-level interventions. For the last fifteen years, he has been conducting ethnographic research on New York City’s House Ball community. He is an expert on Latino gay and bisexual male sexual cultures and HIV and regularly trains public health professionals in cultural competency in working with Latino/a LGBTQ communities. Rivera Colón is now working on a co-edited volume entitled Queer Latino/a Theologies and the Churches.
Emily Zeamer is an anthropologist who is passionate about teaching, and about using anthropology to investigate the ways that humans make and share knowledge, interact with the material world, and grapple with ethical questions. Her teaching philosophy emphasizes training students to become anthropological thinkers by using the theories and research methods of anthropology to see the world with new eyes. How are social differences constructed, negotiated, and reimagined? What is the relationship between people’s sense of time, social life, and inner experience? How do diverse peoples confront the promise and challenge of modernity, including technological innovation, urbanization, and political change? Emily earned her PHD in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a dissertation on Buddhist ethics, everyday practice, and modern change in contemporary urban Thailand. Her academic interests include the anthropological study of knowledge and the senses, comparative modernities, religion and secularism, and the history and theory of ethnographic film and media. She has previously worked as a freelance research anthropologist, using ethnographic field research methods to study market and community dynamics; as a grants administrator in higher education; and a communications coordinator for a human rights organization.
Jonathan Chou received his M.S. in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University and his M.D. from the Keck School of Medicine of USC. He has led multiple community-based participatory narrative medicine research studies and narrative medicine-based community advocacy projects. His work with the community mental health agency SSG/Alliance helped to define the community health orientation of the M.S. in Narrative Medicine at Keck. As a resident physician in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, he was awarded a SAMHSA Minority Fellowship from the American Psychiatric Association to pursue a mental health advocacy project using narrative medicine methods to promote Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander student mental health. Drawing on reading in critical race theory, psychoanalytic theory, experimental poetry of the Asian diaspora, and Asian American literary criticism, his work across disciplines, spaces, and cultures explores the interface of diasporic Asian identity and mental health. Currently, he is an attending psychiatrist and multicultural/community engagement specialist at MIT Medical. A poet as well as a psychiatrist and educator, his debut poetry collection, Resemblance/與, won the 2023 Alma Book Award and is forthcoming with Saturnalia Books in 2024.
Kairos Llobrera received his PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. His academic interests include narrative medicine, U.S. immigration (literature, history, and law), critical race theory, and 20th century and contemporary U.S. ethnic/minority literatures. At USC since 2011, he has held various administrative positions related to undergraduate, graduate, and pre-medical/pre-health education. Presently, he is Assistant Professor of Clinical Medical Education and serves as Director of Community Engagement for Keck’s Narrative Medicine Program.
Lyn Boyd-Judson is co-chair of the Oxford Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights and executive director of the Global Women’s Narratives Project. For three years, Boyd-Judson was executive director and co-chair of the board of the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights. She is currently writing a dissertation for the University Oxford in international human rights law with an emphasis on women, narrative, and human rights mechanisms at the State level. For eleven years, she was executive director of the University of Southern California (USC) Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics where she served as UNESCO Chair for Global Humanities and Ethics. Boyd-Judson’s teaching experience spans short seminars at Oxford on war and peace, religion, refugee policy, and human rights, as well as courses across USC’s Honors Program, School of Journalism, the School of International Relations, and School of Religion. Boyd-Judson’s books include Strategic Moral Diplomacy: Understanding the Enemy’s Moral Universe (2011) and Women’s Global Health: State Policies and International Norms (2014), edited with Patrick James. She has published in International Studies Quarterly, Foreign Policy Analysis, Carnegie Pew Case Studies in Ethics and Diplomacy (Georgetown University), and Leiden Journal of International Law.
Ronan Hallowell, EdD, MA is Assistant Professor of Clinical Medical Education at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. He earned his EdD in Educational Psychology from the University of Southern California, his MA in Philosophy and Religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies and his BA in Economics from Boston College. As a learning scientist in the Department of Medical Education, Dr. Hallowell works with colleagues to provide a suite of curriculum and instruction services to faculty and administrators that include instructional design, faculty development and the Physician-Citizen-Scientist Curriculum Renewal Initiative. His interest in the medical humanities stems from his master’s degree in philosophy and religion, which included in-depth study of the healing traditions of the Lakota Sioux and ten years of training as a ceremonial singer with a traditional Lakota elder. As a faculty affiliate at the Gehr Family Center for Health Systems Science and Innovation he co-teaches the Introduction to Health Policy course for second year MD students in the Professionalism and the Practice of Medicine Program. In addition, he is part of the team creating new health systems science and social justice curricula to be launched in 2021 and is an American Medical Association Health Systems Science Scholar. He serves as an associate director of the USC Center for Mindfulness Science which is a collaborative hub for interdisciplinary research and innovation in the practice of mindfulness. Dr. Hallowell also conducts research on curriculum design, the medical humanities and cross-cultural perspectives on medicine.