NEH Grant to Support Bilingual Materials for Narrative Medicine
Credit: Copyright, Steve Hambuchen
Daena Goldsmith BS ’86, associate dean for faculty development and professor of rhetoric and media studies, and Kristine Muñoz, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, have received a $149,999 Humanities Initiatives grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for their collaborative project titled “Salud, to your Health! Resources for Teaching Health Narratives in English and Spanish.”
Hosted by the University of Iowa, the three-year project will create a digital database of course materials and other resources for developing and teaching courses in narrative medicine and health humanities in English and in Spanish. The repository will include materials for undergraduate courses as well as workshops for health professionals and community groups that encourage the use of oral and written narratives as ways to understand and deal with health, illness, grief, and caregiving. The grant also supports developing a journal for undergraduate students to publish health narratives written in Spanish.
Goldsmith and Muñoz have known each other since graduate school, and this project grew out of their ongoing conversations about courses they teach on health narratives. Comparing notes about syllabi, assignments, readings, and community-based projects sparked the idea to create a website to facilitate sharing on a larger scale.
Among the first entries in the new repository will be materials from Goldsmith’s Health Narratives course (Rhetoric and Media Studies 320) and the Narrative Medicine Practicum she teaches through L&C’s Center for Community and Global Health. That practicum is a joint undertaking between the center and the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative, a nonprofit that brings together health care professionals, patients, caregivers, artists, and scholars to support and promote narrative medicine practices.
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