Health, Humanities, and Society hosts a series of talks about the Humanities and Digital Health

In the 2021-22 academic year, HHS was delighted to host talk on a range of topics at the intersection of the humanities and digital heath. We began this year’s series with an NEH-funded talk from Yale professor of medicine and start of Netflix’s Diagnosis series Lisa Sanders who spoke about her efforts to crowdsource diagnoses for rare diseases and the centrality of narrative to healthcare. In the spring we hosted Hannah Zeavin (Berkeley) who spoke about the history of teletherapy and other automated forms of therapy and Olivia Banner (UT-Dallas) who discussed digital disability and patient advocacy. These talks followed two NEH-funded digital health humanities talks we hosted last year–the first from arguably the founder of digital health humanities, Kirsten Ostherr (Rice), who spoke with us about the importance of humanities for interventions in COVID-19, or what she termed a “data-driven” pandemic and the second was a panel on the data histories of health with Dan Bouk (Colgate) and Joanna Radin (Yale) hosted by Northeastern’s dean of libraries Dan Cohen.