Envisioning Embodiment in the Health Humanities: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature, Culture, and Media (Sustainable Development Goals Series)

Envisioning Embodiment in the Health Humanities: Literature, Culture, and Media examines discourses of embodiment across disability studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and visual studies to inform educational practice as well as cultural criticism related to the health and medical humanities. The book argues that imagery and other visual elements in literature, comics, lived experience and the arts demonstrate the hybridity of the embodied experience and identity and have something to offer to clinical practice. Connected to the UN Sustainable Development Goals 3 (Health), 4 (Gender equality), and 16 (Strong institutions), the topics addressed in the essays include mental health, grief, COVID-19, healthcare practices, cancer, and women’s health. The volume is designed to be accessible to advanced undergraduate students as well as graduate students and to be useful for medical practitioners and others who are interested in the health humanities, disability studies,gender studies, or cultural studies. 

Jodi Cressman is Professor of English at Dominican University, USA, where she teaches courses in college writing, American literature, graphic narrative, literary theory, creative writing, and the health humanities.  Her research focuses on embodiment, witnessing, and the ethics of reading illness narratives, and she is starting a new project about disaster tourism and literary culture.  Her recent scholarship has been published in The Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics as well as Graphic Perspectives on Health and Embodiment (2021), which she co-edited with Lisa DeTora.

Lisa DeTora is Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric and the Director of STEM Writing at Hofstra University, USA. She also serves as guest faculty in medical humanities for the Hofstra Northwell Medical School. Her research focuses on biomedical discourses, such as the function of documentation in shaping bodies of medical knowledge, interests that bridge into her work on trauma and embodiment in popular culture. Lisa’s prior professional experience includes roles in clinical development, scientific and medical affairs. Her work in medical and health humanities includes journal articles on young adult literature and trauma, Bodies in Transition in the Health Humanities: Representations of Corporeality (2020), coedited with Stephanie Hilger, and more.

Jeannie Ludlow is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Eastern Illinois University, USA, where she also teaches courses for the Health Humanities minor and the Latin American Studies minor. Her scholarship and teaching are informed by more than a decade of experience as an abortion care worker. Her research is located in the conceptual gaps between representations of health and medical experiences and politicized discourses of those experiences. Her recent health humanities work has appeared in Graphic Perspectives on Healthand Embodiment (2021); Representing Abortion (2020); Monstrous Women in Comics (2020); and Feminist Formations (2019).

Nora Martin Peterson is Associate Professor of French Cultural Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Her recent book, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France appeared in 2016 as part of the “Early Modern Exchanges” series. Research interests include interdisciplinary work on the body and medicine in early modern literature and culture, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, women’s writing, embodiment, travel narratives, fairy tales, comparative literature, and literary theory. Essays have appeared in Renaissance and Reformation, the Romanic Review, Colloquia Germanica, and The Gerontologist, and as part of the volume Bodies in Transition in the Health Humanities: Representations of Corporeality (2020).