International Health Humanities Network Membership

Rebecca Garden, PhD, is Associate Professor at SUNY Upstate Medical University. She has published on health, narrative, literature, and disability and Deaf studies in journals ranging from New Literary History to the Journal of Clinical Ethics and the Journal of General Internal Medicine. She teaches socio-cultural and ethical issues in health care to medical and nursing as well as liberal arts and sciences student.

I am a member of the Music, Mind and Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Melbourne, Australia. My field is applied music psychology. My work focuses on the interaction between music use and mental health, in particular in people with depression.

An Ethiopian scholar. 
My research interest touches up on Ethiopian/African literature; Mythopoeia and Mythography; Interdisciplinarity—particularly the intersection of
literature and philosophy, psychology, Psychiatry, history, and the arts.  

Laken Geiger is the programs manager at Visual Art Exchange, a non-profit creativity incubator in Raleigh, N.C. She studied Public Relations and Arts Entreprenuership at N.C. State University and is an independent publicist, copy writer, and project manager for creative entreprenuers. With an interest in personal inquiry, development, and well-being, she is increasingly interested in activating her knowledge as a personal trainer and nutrition specialist to develop programs, social campaigns, and resources for adolescent women as a way to marry art experiences and physical activity, to remove stigmas associated with behavioral health changes, and to alieviate barriers to self-inquiry, which lead to the development of new habits, mindfulness, and self-efficacy. Geiger will study in public health and recreation in a graduate program in the fall of 2018.  

I am a PhD candidate and teaching associate at University of Massachusetts Amherst. My primary focus of research is on representations of trauma in literature, art, and culture. 

Mark Gilbert is a Scottish/Canadian artist and researcher. For the past 18 years, he has worked on a number of interdisciplinary projects in the field of medicine and the visual arts (portraiture). In August last year, he earned his doctorate in the Medical Sciences Interdepartmental Area (MSIA) from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, USA.

His doctoral dissertation entitled The Experience of Portraiture in a Clinical Setting, employed arts-based research and narrative inquiry to systematically explore and analyze the collaborative process required to co-construct expressive works of illness, recovery and care. The study could potentially contribute valuable applications for teaching topics related to the delivery of clinical care, the nature of doctor/patient interactions and humanistic traditions in healthcare.

His doctoral research built upon two previous research projects where I collaborated with clinical medicine as an artist and researcher. These projects were entitled Saving Faces (UK) and Portraits of Care (USA)(www.markgilbert.co.uk).

Senior Lecturer and Chair of Department of Media and Communication at University of Sydney. I teach creative non-fiction and feature writing, and have research interests in the role of pleasue in health promotion, specifically breastfeeding, but also other preventive health issues, and a theoretical interest in somaesthetics and its potential to critique the quantified self movement. 

I am a graduate of the English Ph.D. program at The University of Western Ontario in Canada. I currently work in a volunteer capacity as a Program Coordinator with The Public Humanities @ Western, an intiative designed to forge collaborative partnerships between Western's Art & Humanities Faculty and the surrounding community of London, Ontario. A link to this initiative's website can be found here.

I am particularly interested in the intersections between the humanities and medical care. In Septermber of 2011, I defended my doctoral dissertation, titled "Feeling Better: The Therapeutic Drug in Modernism," which tracks the historical rise of pharmaceutical approaches to mental and spiritual illness through early to mid-twentieth century literature. A link to my dissertation can be found here.

Since 2011, I have also worked as a proposal manager for numerous information security companies seeking work contracts with Canadian healthcare organizations. Through this experience, I have become deeply interested in changing attitudes toward healthcare funding and policy, particularly as these relate to an increasing emphasis on community mental health and qualitiative approaches to caregiving. 

Finally, i have used my backgrond in writing as a fundraiser for The Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre, a community mental health non-profit based in Toronto's Parkdale Village. I have also published a novel that merges my interest in both humanities research and medical care, titled "Ill Humour." A link to this novel's Amazon page can be found here. 

Student interested using the arts, in particular performance, to promote and investigate health promotion and healing in individuals and communities. Special interest in using role play for behavioral interventions.