BIOS
Keynote Speakers
Sander Gilman
Sander Gilman is an American historian known for his contributions to Jewish studies as well as the history of medicine. He is a distinguished professor of liberal arts and sciences as well as psychiatry at Emory University. He is the author and editor of over ninety books throughout his career. Gilman’s focus is on medicine and its constellations of medical, social and political discourse.
Sarah de Leeuw
Sarah de Leeuw is an award winning researcher and writer in northern British Columbia. Her work focuses on marginalized people and geographies. Sarah is the research director of the Health Arts Research Center and currently a professor at University of Northern British Columbia in the Northern medical program as well as health humanities.
Participants
Richard Oko Ajah teaches literature, criticism and French language in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Uyo in Nigeria where he graduated with First Class and with several awards. He obtained M.A with distinction and Doctorate degrees from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria as ETF Scholar. Dr. Ajah’s areas of specialization are comparative, African and Maghrebian literatures, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, graphic novels/BDs, travel writing and digital humanities. His current research is centered on what he calls Pictographic criticism and Computer-Assisted Literary Analysis (CALA) as part of his Digital Humanities scholarship. His articles have appeared in international and national learned journals such as Wagadu, Meridian Critic, Caleidoscopio among others; he has applied postcolonial theory to African francophone war narratives, travel writing, graphic novels and other literary multimodal texts. He has participated in conferences in Europe, America and other parts of Africa. Dr. Ajah is a published poet, coeditor of Language and Literature in the Dis/Service of Humanity (2016) and author of From Letters to Images (forthcoming). He is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of European Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Maria Olive Alexopoulos is a lecturer in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus) and holds a PhD in English Literature and Cultural Studies from Humboldt University Berlin. Her research interests include affect theory and the cultural politics of emotion, feminist theory, and sexuality studies, and she is currently involved in a collaboration with colleagues from Humboldt University Berlin and the Universities of Vienna and Warsaw, entitled Queer Theory in Translation. Her current research takes as its subject the gender and sexual politics of ‘mass psychogenic illness’. Specifically, it explores the phenomenon’s narrativization in literature and film, suggesting that more than just a manifestly sensational spectacle or representational strategy, mass psychogenic illness, or ‘mass hysteria’ can help us to better understand contemporary constructions of gendered subjectivity, the complexities of embodiment, and expressions and experiences of belonging and ‘othering’.
Aude Bandini is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Montreal. She is a Patient-Partner and voluntary participant for clinical trials and research at Montreal Clinical Research Institute. She is also involved in the next 2019-2020 CIHR Strategic Plan Consensus Workshops.
Maxime Raymond Bock was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1981. After pursuing studies in sports, music, and literature, he published four books of fiction, of which two, Atavismes (Atavisms, Dalkey Archive, 2015), and Des lames de pierre (Baloney, Coach House, 2016), were translated into English. His latest collection of short fiction, Les noyades secondaires, was published with Cheval d’août éditeur (Montreal, Qc) in 2017. He is a doctoral candidate at the Université de Montréal working on a research-creation thesis, writing a novel set in Montreal’s east end in the mid-20th century, and an academic thesis researching the representations of Montreal and post-Quiet-Revolution modernity in the work of Montreal writer Gilbert La Rocque (1943-1984).
Léonore Brassard is a PhD candidate in comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal. Her researches focus on the prostitutional exchange in modern literature, mostly in the work of Nelly Arcan, Marguerite Duras and Marcel Proust. Since her master’s degree, in which she worked on the gendered performance in both Les Chiennes Savantes by Virginie Despentes and L’Ève Future by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, she has been interested on the topic of feminism and queer studies. She published articles on Despentes and co-organized a symposium on the work of the author last Spring 2019. She is also the head redactor of Post-Scriptum, the comparative literature’s graduate students’ journal of the Université de Montréal.
David Caron is Professor of French and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. He was the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the author of AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures (Wisconsin, 2001) and My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community (Cornell, 2009). His last book, entitled The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV (Minnesota, 2014), offers a personal look at the experience, meanings, and politics of HIV disclosure. He also edited a special issue of the Romanic Review on the legacy of Ross Chambers (forthcoming). He is currently at work on a book about contemporary queer cinema from Asia, Europe, and the Americas tentatively titled “Think Strange: Transnational Queer Cinema and the Poetics of Personhood.”
Chang-Hee Kim is an associate professor of English at Yonsei University at Wonju in South Korea. He received his doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2009. His research interests include American literature of multiculturalism, focusing on issues of race, gender, sexuality, and biopolitics in the post-WWII United States in light of its postcolonial, transnational, and neoliberal condition of life, recently more of the emerging field of medical humanities in Asian America studies. More specifically, he is interested in the Cold War experiences of Asian immigrants and their descents in the post-World War II United States regarding how the biopolitical agenda of the Cold War affects ways in which Asian America subjectivity was shaped ontologically in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and (trans)nationality in the U.S. Empire. Some of his publications include: “The Biopolitical Effect of Cold War Containment in a Coming-of-Age Narrative: On Postcolonial Subjectivity in Hagedorn’s Dogeaters” in Journal of Narrative Theory 47.1 (Winter 2017), pp. 90-117 and “Asian Performance on the Stage of American Empire in Flower Drum Song,” Cultural Critique 85 (Fall 2013), pp. 1-37.
Benjamin Gagnon Chainey is an active physical therapist and a PhD candidate in French language literature, jointly at Université de Montréal and at Nottingham Trent University, UK. As a physical therapist, he is currently practicing in neurology at Montréal’s Villa Medica rehabilitation hospital, with patients suffering from the impacts of a stroke or fighting against a brain tumor. Scholar 2017 of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, and recipient of the 2017 Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, his PhD research in French Literature analyzes the expression of suffering bodies and languages, the historical transformations of empathy between the caregiver and the dying patient, and the modulations of access to knowledge in both 19th-century medically-inspired literature and contemporary AIDS literature. His creative and critical work has been published in MuseMedusa, Fixxion, Interférences littéraires, Mœbius, SYNAPSIS and Lettres françaises.
Phyllisa Deroze is an Assistant Professor of American Literature at the United Arab Emirates University (Dubai, UAE) with special interest in Contemporary Drama, Women's literature, African American and African Diaspora literature, Disability Studies, and Theory and Criticism. She earned her Ph.D, from Pennsylvania State University in 2010. Dr Deroze published many articles and chapters including "Black Panther: A Black Girl's Song" in The Journal of Pan African Studies (2018), and “Deconstructing the Urban Circuit: Gospel Musicals, Langston Hughes’s Legacy, and Tyler Perry’s Contemporary Influence” in Salem Press (2017).
Patty Douglas is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brandon University. She
researches and teaches in disability studies, critical autism studies and critical approaches to
mothering and care using arts-informed, interpretive and cultural studies approaches. Douglas works with teachers, families and disabled persons to challenge stereotypes, generate new possibilities for living well with difference and reimagine health and education systems beyond exclusion and deficit approaches.
In 2007, at age 34, Jonathan Garfinkel was selected by the Toronto Star as “one to watch”. Since then he has gone on to publish an internationally celebrated memoir, Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide, as well as the Governor General’s shortlisted play House of Many Tongues. His award-winning poetry, non-fiction and plays have been anthologized and translated into twelve languages, and his first novel, The Altruist, is forthcoming with House of Anansi Press (2020). Currently he is doing his PhD in cultural studies, with a focus on medical and health humanities, in the MLCS department at University of Alberta under Professor Daniel Laforest’s supervision.
Irene Geerts is a cultural historian and a PhD candidate at the Open University of The Netherlands (location Amsterdam). She specializes in the history of psychiatry. The subject of her PhD project is the social movement of relatives of people with psychiatric and/or addiction problems in The Netherlands, 1960-2000.
Rhonda Gonzales is Professor of African and African Diaspora History at The University of Texas at San Antonio. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Historical Association have supported her research on the history of women’s roles in sustaining and transforming communities through religion, medicine and economy in precolonial Africa and in the African Diaspora in Mexico. Her publications include Bantu Africa, 3500 BCE to 1800 CE, Societies, Religion, and History: Central East Tanzanians and the World They Created, c. 200 BCE to 1800 CE and Bantu Africa, 3500 BCE-1500 CE.
Dominique Hétu is a postdoctoral fellow (SSHRC, CLC) at the Canadian Literature Centre (U Alberta), where she works at the intersections of feminist care ethics, ordinary ethics, and contemporary Canadian literature by women in French and English. Drawing on theoretical and literary productions, her work complicates the ethical and material stances of care with poetics to further delineate and problematize the role of literature in configuring and reflecting on the meanings, gestures, and costs of care in contemporary contexts. She has published in Canadian Literature, Ariel, Mosaic, TransVerse, temps zero, and Nouvelles vues, and she contributed a chapter to Comparative Literature for the New Century (McGill-Queen’s, 2018). She also edited a bilingual (French and English) journal issue titled “Models of Care and Women’s Writing” to be published in Studies in Canadian Literature in 2019.
Esther L. Jones is Associate Professor of English and the E. Franklin Frazier Chair of African American Literature, Theory and Culture. She teaches American and African American literature and culture, including Major American Writers II, African American Literature I and II, Special Topics courses in African American literature, literature and medicine, and speculative fiction. Her research and publications include subjects ranging from identity formation and intimate partner violence in popular culture to race, gender, and bioethics in science fiction. Her current book, Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, examines the constructions of black pathology and bioethics in science fiction by contemporary black women writers.
Eric Jorgensen recently completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara with his dissertation, Reacquired: I, Thou and the American AIDS Play. The project is as a confluence of his work as an actor, a performance scholar, and an aid worker. He spent nine years as Finance Officer with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders USA including field work in Nigeria, South Sudan, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, and Jordan. Dr. Jorgensen is now Associate Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
Fernanda Pérez-Gay Juarez is a Medical Doctor born in Mexico City in 1988. She obtained a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at McGill University. Her scientific work, which revolves around categorization, perception, language and theory of mind, has been presented in local and international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals. She is the author of more than 30 science broadcasting articles in English and Spanish, and the head of the project SINAPSIS, Conexiones entre el Arte y tu Cerebro, which explores and broadcasts the links between neuroscience and art for a general audience.
Reisa Klein is an Adjunct Academic Colleague in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. She is currently working on her book manuscript Pink Ink: Mastectomy Tattoos, Breast Cancer Activism and the Re-Ma(r)king of Reconstruction (University of Toronto Press) and is co-editing a special issue of Imaginations: Journal of Cross- Cultural Image Studies on “Reimaging Breasts,” (Forthcoming Fall 2019).
Steven Kurtz is a doctoral pre-candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. His research interests lie primarily in contemporary French literature, and in particular illness narratives and testimonial writing, through which he is currently exploring questions of immunity, solidarity, and care both at the level of the body and in society.
Alexis McGee is an Assistant Professor in the Composition and Rhetoric and English Studies programs in the Department of English at the University of Alabama. Her research interests include Black women’s language and literacies, rhetorical theory, and Hip Hop pedagogy. Her work has been published in Pedagogy and Obsidian; her latest book chapter was published in The Lemonade Reader.
Jocelyn Moody is the Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she teaches courses on African American literature and life writing, US slavery, Black feminisms, and 19th-century (African) American literature. She has served as founding coeditor of the West Virginia University Press book series Regenerations: African American Literature with John Ernest since 2009. She reissued the Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge through Regenerations series in 2014 and contributed to Reading African American Autobiography, edited by Eric Lamore (2017).
Emilia Nielsen is Assistant Professor of Arts, Medicine and Healing in York University’s Health & Society Program, Department of Social Science. She is the author of the scholarly text, Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair (University of Toronto Press, 2019) as well as two collections of poetry. Body Work (Signature Editions, 2018), was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry and the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Surge Narrows (Leaf Press, 2013), her debut collection of poetry, was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
Hilary Offman is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with a private practice in Toronto, Canada with hospital appointments at the University Health Network and St. Michael’s Hospital at the University of Toronto. She is a graduate, faculty member and supervisor of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and a lecturer and supervisor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto. In addition, she is the former co-chair of the Candidates Committee for the International Association of Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (IARPP) and a current member of the IARRP Board of Directors.
Sheri Parks is Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Dr. Parks teaches in American Studies. Until recently, she was the Founding Director of the Arts and Humanities Center for Synergy, which fosters interdisciplinary and socially engaged research and activity. An active and leading presence in Baltimore, she currently serves as the president of the board of directors for the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. Her research specializes in public aesthetics, particularly the ways in which people find and create meaning and beauty in their everyday lives, with specific emphasis on race, gender, social class, sexuality, popular culture, and media. Her most recent publication is Fierce Angels: Living with a Legacy from the Sacred Dark Feminine to the Strong Black Woman.
Katerina Pavlidi is a CEELBAS-funded PhD student at the Slavonic Studies section at the University of Cambridge. Katerina holds a BA in Modern Greek and Byzantine literature from the University of Cyprus and an MPhil in Comparative literatures and cultures from the University of Cambridge. Her current research project focuses on Russian literature of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, with a particular focus on the underground artistic group of Moscow Conceptualism. Specifically, she examines the relationship between body and language in the literary and theatrical works of the Russian postmodernist author Vladimir Sorokin. Her research interests also include literature and theatre of the Russian and European Avant-garde of the early twentieth century.
Megan Perram
Forthcoming
Stéphanie Proulx is a PhD candidate in French Studies at the University of Toronto and works under the supervision of Professor Barbara Havercroft. Her background in Philosophy, as well as the research she carried out as part of her master’s dissertation on the representations of the Shoah’s memory in contemporary Quebec novels, has led her to focus her research on the link between literature and ethics. Wishing to pursue a newly initiated dialogue between literature and ethics of care, she will examine the representations of disease and dependency in contemporary women’s writing from France and Québec in her doctoral dissertation.
Carla Rice is Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Guelph specialising in embodiment studies and in arts-based and creative methodologies. She founded Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice as an arts-informed research centre with a mandate to foster inclusive communities, social well-being, equity, and justice. Rice has received awards for research and mentorship, and has written on embodied difference, non-normative cultures, and accessibility and inclusion. More information about the Re•Vision Centre can be found at: https://projectrevision.ca/.
Alekszandra Rokvity is a PhD candidate at the Karl Franzens University of Graz in Austria, working in the fields of cultural studies and medical humanities. Her doctoral dissertation deals with the social discourse surrounding menstruation and its consequences on the healthcare women receive, with a focus on endometriosis. After being a student-lecturer of American Literature and Culture at her home university, she has spent a year as a doctoral research fellow at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her areas of interest are gender studies, medical humanities, popular culture and postmodernism.
Rolando Rubalcava
Rolando Rubalcava is a 2nd year PhD student in American Literature in the Ohio State University English department. His academic interests focus on Graphic Medicine, the intersection between Medical Humanities and Graphic Narratives.
Audrey Shafer, MD is Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine / Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System; founder and director, Stanford Medicine & the Muse Program, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics; co-director, Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration; and co-founder of Pegasus Physician Writers
Areej Siddiqui is an Individual, Couple and Family Therapist currently serving ill/disabled people and their families in East Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. Areej completed an MSc in Couple and Family Therapy under the Family Relations and Nutrition Department at the University of Guelph, Ontario.
Julie Van Dam is Associate Professor of French (teaching) in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Southern California (PhD, UCLA). She is the author of Critical Conditions: Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Carribbean Women’s Writing (Lexington, 2012), and has published in journals such as the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and Wagadu. She is a Fulbright Grant recipient for her project on emerging urban arts from the suburbs of Dakar, Senegal such as film, graffiti, and hip hop, and their role in health promotion and disability awareness in local and global spaces.
Anna West
Anna West is a political and medical anthropologist whose work focuses on the intersections of health promotion, governance, and citizenship in southern Africa. Her dissertation research in Malawi combined ethnographic and archival work to locate contemporary rural health promotion paradigms in sedimented landscapes of intervention dating to the colonial period. Anna earned her doctorate in Anthropology at Stanford and holds a master’s in International Health from Johns Hopkins. She is an Assistant Professor at Haverford College, where she directs the interdisciplinary minor in Health Studies.
Dorothy Woodman is a contract instructor at the University of Alberta and Concordia University of Edmonton. Her body has experienced medicalization with Juvenile Ideopathic Arthritis, Stage III Breast Cancer, and other conditions. Theoretical interests in cancer as a material site of cultural inquiry lead to examination of breast cancer writings (Dissertation, 2012). Current research includes an in-progress, co-authored monograph on Marvel superheroes with cancer and a co-edited special journal on “Reimaging Breasts” (forthcoming Fall 2019).