Envisioning Embodiment in the Health Humanities

Jodi Cressman is Professor of English at Dominican University, USA, where she teaches courses in college writing, American literature, graphic narrative, literary theory, creative writing, and the health humanities.  Her research focuses on embodiment, witnessing, and the ethics of reading illness narratives, and she is starting a new project about disaster tourism and literary culture.  Her recent scholarship has been published in The Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics as well as Graphic Perspectives on Health and Embodiment (2021), which she co-edited with Lisa DeTora.Lisa DeTora is Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric and the Director of STEM Writing at Hofstra University, USA. She also serves as guest faculty in medical humanities for the Hofstra Northwell Medical School. Her research focuses on biomedical discourses, such as the function of documentation in shaping bodies of medical knowledge, interests that bridge into her work on trauma and embodiment in popular culture. Lisa’s prior professional experience includes roles in clinical development, scientific and medical affairs. Her work in medical and health humanities includes journal articles on young adult literature and trauma, Bodies in Transition in the Health Humanities: Representations of Corporeality (2020), coedited with Stephanie Hilger, and more.Jeannie Ludlow is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Eastern Illinois University, USA, where she also teaches courses for the Health Humanities minor and the Latin American Studies minor. Her scholarship and teaching are informed by more than a decade of experience as an abortion care worker. Her research is located in the conceptual gaps between representations of health and medical experiences and politicized discourses of those experiences. Her recent health humanities work has appeared in Graphic Perspectives on Healthand Embodiment (2021); Representing Abortion (2020); Monstrous Women in Comics (2020); and Feminist Formations (2019).Nora Martin Peterson is Associate Professor of French Cultural Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Her recent book, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France appeared in 2016 as part of the “Early Modern Exchanges” series. Research interests include interdisciplinary work on the body and medicine in early modern literature and culture, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, women’s writing, embodiment, travel narratives, fairy tales, comparative literature, and literary theory. Essays have appeared in Renaissance and Reformation, the Romanic Review, Colloquia Germanica, and The Gerontologist, and as part of the volume Bodies in Transition in the Health Humanities: Representations of Corporeality (2020).

• Foreword by Stephanie Hilger.- Introduction: Envisioning Embodiment by Jodi Cressman, Lisa DeTora, Jeannie Ludlow, and Nora Martin Peterson.- Part I: Envisioning the Self.- Nora Martin Peterson, Be Yourself: Visual Technologies of Self-Creation in the Seventeenth Century and Today.- Sophie Witt, Theatres of Psychosomatics.- Serena Fusco, Reappropriating Breastfeeding as Power and Time in Photography and Feminist Discourse.- Amanda Greene, Enacting #Endometriosis: Feminist Approaches to the Instagrammatic Illness Narrative.- Barbara Grüning, Embodying Mental Illness: Anorexia and Bulimia in Graphic Novel Narratives.- Elizabeth Lanphier, Rehearsing Grief: Turning to Look at Loss in Eurydice.- Part II: Envisioning the Other.- Shalini Abayasekara, Life and death: The COVID-19 pandemic and Sri Lanka’s Embodied Muslims.- Derek Ettensohn, “Why should I imagine such a thing?”: The Representation of Suffering in Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012).- Lisa DeTora, (Non?) Toxic Masculinities: Envisioning Gender in Recent Television Series.- Jodi Cressman, Making the Rounds: Communication and Healthcare in Alice Walker’s “Strong Horse Tea”.- Katja Herges, Migration, Nature and the Body in Birgit Weyhe’s Graphic Narrative Madgermanes.- Jeannie Ludlow, Vaccinated by the Blood: Antiabortion Mobilization of the COVID Body.