Rebecca Garden, PhD, is Associate Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical University and Executive Director for the Consortium for Culture and Medicine. She brings health humanities and disability studies perspectives to bear on healthcare and public health pedagogy and practice, focusing on disability, chronic illness, and aging, as well as racism and immigration. She has published in New Literary History, Literature and Medicine, the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and the Journal of Medical Humanities, as well as in the volumes The Encyclopedia of Health Humanities, Keywords in Disability Studies, and The Health Humanities Reader.William J Spurlin, Ph.D., is Honorary Professor of English & Comparative Literature and Professor Emeritus in the College of Business, Arts & Social Sciences at Brunel University London.He has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexual dissidence across francophone, Germanic, and African contexts; he is widely known for his work in postcolonial queer studies and for examining sexuality as a significant vector of social organisation and cultural arrangement in colonial and postcolonial Africa, particularly addressing the ways in which western medicine became a tool of European imperial power. Professor Spurlin’s most recent book Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb was published in 2022; his other books include Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009) and Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa (2006). He has also published in medical humanities on sexuality, health, and HIV/AIDS in postcolonial contexts and on queer translation studies in several journals, including the Journal of Medical Humanities and Comparative Literature Studies. He was named Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences in 2017 in recognition of the contribution of his research in queer studies to social science scholarship.
