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Program

Download the complete symposium program HERE.

Confirmed Plenary Speakers

David Cantor

"Choosing to Live: Cancer Education, Movies, and the Conversion Narrative in Twentieth-Century America"

David Cantor is Deputy Director of the Office of NIH History, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. His scholarly work focuses on the twentieth-century history of medicine, most recently the history of cancer. He is the editor of Reinventing Hippocrates (Ashgate, 2002) and Cancer in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), and series editor (edited collections) of Studies for the Society of the Social History of Medicine. Medicine and Culture published by Pickering and Chatto. In 2002 Dr. Cantor established the National Library of Medicine’s Online Syllabus Archive, the world’s largest collection of syllabi in the history of medicine. He has also organized workshops and lecture series including, Cancer in the Twentieth Century (2004), Genomics in Perspective (2006), and Meat, Medicine, and Human Health in the Twentieth Century (2006).

Arthur W. Frank

“Telling Your Story: Narrative Illness in an Age of Authenticity and Appropriation”

Arthur W. Frank is professor of sociology at the University of Calgary. He is the author of At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness (1991, new edition 2002) and The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (1995), and The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live (2004). His current book project has the working title, How Stories Make Up People: A Storyteller’s Book About Narrative (under contract to University of Chicago Press). Dr. Frank serves on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals, including being a contributing editor of Literature and Medicine and book review editor for health: an interdisciplinary journal. He is an elected fellow of The Royal Society of Canada and lectures internationally on narrative, illness experience, healthcare, and ethics.

Martha Stoddard-Holmes

“Cancer Comix: Narrating Cancer through Sequential Art”

Martha Stoddard Holmes is Associate Professor of Literature and Writing Studies, California State University, San Marcos, where she teaches British literature, cultural studies, and children’s literature. She researches the cultural history of the body from Victorian culture to the present, with special interests in the public and private cultures of disability and illness. Author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (U Michigan Press) 2004 and coeditor of The Teacher’s Body: Embodiment, Authority, and Identity in the Classroom (SUNY Press) 2003, she has also coedited special issues of Literature and Medicine (on Narrative, Pain, and Suffering) and Journal of Medical Humanities (on Disability and Medicine: Beyond the Medical Model). Her current scholarly project explores how public culture guides how we imagine (or don’t imagine) cancer.

Sessions and Activities

• The independent documentary film, A Lion In The House: The Transformative Power of Storytelling at Pediatric End-of-Life
• A performance by artist, Gretchen Case
• Illness narrative workshops
• A variety of breakout sessions on such topics as: Female Identity and the Language of Breast Cancer; Scar Photography: Elements of Style; Bioethics and Cancer: When the Professional Becomes Personal; Narratives of Cancer and Aging: Genres and Metaphors of Mystery; Scrapbooking Cancer Narratives; Our Stories, Ourselves: Healthcare Professionals as Patients; Cancer in Literature; and more