Medical Humanities/ Literature and Medicine

[harpyemma]

I'm hoping for some help identifying (quite particular) potential doctoral programmes in the US and Canada.

 

I'm from the UK, and "Medical Humanities" is a rapidly growing field of research over here and every year there's a jump in the number of departments offering Medical Humanities, History of Medicine, and Literature and Medicine Master's degrees. There's also a growing number of Med Hums departments attached to or stemming from English (and/or History) depts. Off the top of my head there's Leeds, Leicester, KCL, UCL, Birkbeck, QMUL, Manchester, Durham, Exeter. There's certainly more. If someone is looking to do a PhD in the Medical Humanities, there's ample opportunity to do so and to find a supervisor whose interests align with your own.

 

What's the story for the US? I know that Med Hums are quite big at Columbia, especially as they're co-organising a conference with KCL in London this summer... but as far as i've been able to discover, they don't actually have many staff members in the English dept whose interests would suit someone hoping to conduct research in this field--at least, not in the same way i've been seeing in the UK. But, perhaps i'm not looking in the right places.

 

The other possibly confounding thing is that the research I hope to do might appear a bit too anti-psychiatry for US academia (compared with the UK scene, anyway). I would like to research the DSM as a literary and cultural artefact and examine its influence on/interaction with popular culture... Am i shit outta luck when it comes to compatibility with doctoral programmes in the States/Canada?

 

Thanks!

[midnight]

Might this help you?

 

http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/directory.html

[Two Espressos]

Try looking at UNC-Chapel Hill.  Medical humanities is a big thing with them right now.

[rdsull89]

We've got quite a bit of literature and medicine studies going on at UC Riverside right now, particularly in the area of addiction studies.