Rachel Conrad Bracken, a PhD candidate in Rice's Department of English, has been awarded the Center for Teaching Excellence's Graduate Student Instructor Award for 2017, for her First-year Writing Intensive Seminar, "Science/Fiction and the Future of Medicine."
The Civic Humanist Program launched its 2017 Medical Humanities and Cultural Heritage events this fall, delivering a total of 10 events, which included: five campus field trips and five off-campus lectures for local Houston high school groups.
The Medical Humanities program at Rice is invested in bringing humanistic research on health to publics in and outside the medical field. Medicine, and our broader conceptions of health, are important domains of inquiry and discussion for both healthcare professionals, patients, and people who aren't currently patients (but all of us likely will be some day).
On April 8, 2017, Critical Care: Disability Interventions in the Logics of Cure brought together Medical Humanities students and faculty at Rice, with community organizations, and attendees from UT Health, Texas Women's University, and other Houston institutions to rethink the nature of cure, care, and diagnosis in varying contexts of illness and disability.
The 2017 International Health Humanities Consortium conference was held in the Texas Medical Center, where scholars from around the world came to share their research under the theme "Diversity, Cultures, and Health Humanities."
This semester, the HRC has partnered with the Rice Humanities Graduate Student Association (HGSA) to network Rice graduate students with Houston-area NTT and non-academic professionals with Ph.D.'s.
The HRC's practica program enables Rice undergraduates to conduct humanities research in local cultural and medical institutions, and to couple this research with hands-on work that materially benefits the sponsoring institution. In our pilot semester, Spring 2016, two students worked at the Woodson Research Center, at Rice's Fondren Library, to explore projects in cultural heritage and the medical humanities.
As part of our Mellon-funded Public Humanities initiative at Rice, the HRC promotes alt-ac programming and development for advanced graduate students. The HRC competitively funds two sixth-year Ph. D. students annually, (applications due soon!) to work with local institutions as they complete their degree. This helps graduate students make professional connections in the area while developing their scholarship in a publicly-oriented direction.
The HRC's practica program just completed its second semester, with students working at the Institute for Spirituality and Health, the Texas Medical Center Library's McGovern Historical Research Center, Archway Gallery, and the Menil Collection. This semester was particularly exciting because our two cultural heritage practica students created experimental installation pieces for their final projects, based on their semester's research (we will be writing in January about our medical humanities practica students, when some of their work is made public).