International Health Humanities Network Membership

I am currently a full-time faculty member at the Columbia University School of Social Work. I have quite a lot of direct practice and research experience with individuals, families, and communities facing a wide range of issues including extremely difficult, potentially traumatic events and circumstances such as life threatening illness, death of a loved one, intimate partner violence, and disaster. I am an accomplished teacher, trainer, and group facilitator who consistently advocates for equity (e.g., social, economic, relational) and recognition of the inherent worth and strength of every individual and community. I am also an adept student with a deep appreciation for the opportunities I’ve been given and the many people I’ve learned from including those for whom I’ve been a professional service provider. I am a firm believer that despite the particular role or title one may be assigned in a given encounter (e.g. client, provider) meaningful goals are achieved only within the context of relationships built on shared trust and respect. In this regard, my work has always been inherently collaborative even if imperfectly so.  For example, while I believe the knowledge and skills I’ve acquired in the fields of social work and narrative medicine will be assets for recently planned research investigating creative arts interventions with older adults, so too will the unique experiences of my partners. Despite the challenges associated with “community-university partnerships”, including the negotiation of different cultures, expectations, and resources, I am convinced that collaborattive practice and research is an essential and just pathway toward improvements in health and well-being.

Helen is a Reader in Mental Health in the School of Social Work and Community Engagment at the University of Central Lancashire. She is also an active member of the Asylum magazine collective  www.asylumonline.net

I am a human-computer interaction, experience design, and performance researcher working in the field of Performative Experience Design. My research combines performance theory and practice - performance like the kind on a stage, not like the speed of your processor! - with design-oriented research. My aim is to create unusual, thought-provoking, meaningful, life-affirming, and even transformational experiences with technology.

My new book, Performative Experience Design, is part of Springer's Cultural Computing Series.

It's based in part on my thesis, Performative Experience Design: Theories and practices for intermedial autobiographical performance, accepted by the University of Surrey in February 2015. My stupendous supervisors were Dr Stuart Andrews and Professor David Frohlich, head of the Digital World Research Centre.

After two research fellowships at Surrey in 2014-2015, RE-DrAW(Research and Development for the Digital Arts in Wales) and Storytelling for Development, I am now a Visiting Researcher at the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham.

B.A., Yale University
M.S., Columbia University, Narrative Medicine

Associate Faculty, Columbia University Department of Narrative Medicine
Faculty, Einstein-Cardozo Master of Science in Bioethics

Sue qualified as a RGN in 1982 at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, she then qualified as a District Nurse in 1985 and then worked as a Diabetes Specialist Nurse for a number of years before moving into higher education in 1996.

Sue Spencer first attended a creative writing workshop with Julia Darling in 2004 and her life has never been the same since. Finding magic in words Sue has studied the MA in Poetry at Newcastle University and has led a number of writing workshops across the North East particularly related to well-being.

Originally the poet in residence at Willow Burn Sue moved from her post as Senior Lecturer in Adult and Community Nursing at a local University to be Head of Clinical Services at Willow Burn in August 2014.

One of her visions (she has quite a few!) is to ensure that the creative arts and health care practice are more closely linked together for the benefit of all patients, carers, families and staff who work in the Hospice setting.

Sue has written  and presented at Conferences about the power of poetry in health care and is an active member of Lapidus.

Sue qualified as a nurse 1982 in Cambridge and then moved to London to work as a District Nurse. In 1986 she moved up to the North East and worked as a Diabetes Specialist Nurse for a number of years before moving into higher education.

Sue first attended a creative writing workshop with Julia Darling in 2004 and her life has never been the same since. Finding magic in words Sue has studied the MA in Poetry at Newcastle University and has led a number of writing workshops across the North East particularly related to health and well-being.

One of her visions (she has quite a few!) is to ensure that the creative arts and health care practice are more closely linked together for the benefit of all patients, carers, families and staff who work in health care.

Sue has written and presented at Conferences about the power of poetry in health care and is an active member of Lapidus.

Susan Squier received her education at Princeton University and Stanford University. She is Brill Professor of Women's Studies, English and STS (Science, Technology and Society) at The Pennsylvania State University.

Her research Interests include: cultural studies of science and medicine; feminist theory; comics and medicine; disability studies and human-animal-object studies. Major Publications: Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (1985); Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (1994); Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (1984); Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (1989); Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (1999); Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (Duke University Press, 2003), Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Duke University Press, 2004) and Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (2011) which won the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts.  With Dr. Ian Williams (UK) she co-edits the Penn State University Press book series, Graphic Medicine, which publishes scholarly studies of comics, as well as comics themselves, that enact and explore the experiences of health care, medicine, illness, and disability.

She was scholar in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center (February-March 2001), Visiting Distinguished Fellow, LaTrobe University, Melbourne Australia (1992) and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, Melbourne, Australia (1990-1991). She is Editorial Board member of the Journal of Medical Humanities, and Executive Board member and past President of the Society for Literature and Science. In Summer 2002, she co-directed (with Anne Hunsaker Hawkins) the NEH Summer Institute, "Medicine, Literature, and Culture," held at the Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey Medical Center. She is on the Editorial Board of the Penn State University Press, and the Selection Jury of the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize in 2011-2012.  She also serves on the Advisory Board of SymbioticA, Biological Arts, Perth, Western Australia.

Sakshi Srivastava is a research scholar from Banaras Hindu University, India. For the last two years, she has been working in the field of Critical Medical Humanities focusing on the relationship between narratives and the experience of illnesses. She likes to explore the representation of illnesses in literary, cultural and cinematic texts, alongwith the associated social and philosophical dimensions. She lives in Varanasi and writes poetry occasionally. 

Sakshi Srivastava is a PhD research scholar in the department of English, Banaras Hindu University. She has completed her MA and BA in English Literature. Within the medical humanities, her areas of interest are narrtaives of illness, phenomenology of illness and dementia narratives. She is also interested in theatrical and cinematic representation of illness and medicine. 

Historian of modern medicine with a particular focus on the histories of infectious disease, public health, and ageing.