Health and Humanities Lab at UNC Chapel Hill

HHIVE Blog

Why Interdisciplinarity Matters: Reflections on Studying Abroad in London

This summer, I attended 2024 UNC’s Burch Field Research Seminar on Infectious Disease through the lenses of science and literature. Many people (understandably) seemed confused about how literature and biology were relevant to each other, especially how literature was relevant … Read more
Rhetoric and Responsibilization: My Summer Research Experience

Does medicine speak to us? In what ways are we persuaded by the underlying messages of pharmaceutical campaigns, drug advertisements, or medical commercials? I asked these crucial questions as I drafted my Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) proposal to the … Read more
The Power of Illness Narratives in ENGL 264/ANTH 272

“Whether ill people want to tell stories or not, illness calls for stories” — Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller. Frank’s assertion that illness calls for stories captures the central mission of ANTH 272/ENGL 264: Healing in Ethnography and Literature, a … Read more
CFP: Health Humanities Consortium Conference

2025 HHC Conference in Philadelphia The 2025 Health Humanities Consortium Conference (HHC), co-presented by Jefferson Humanities & Health and the Health Humanities Consortium, will be held in Center City, Philadelphia from April 2-5, 2025. The annual HHC Conference is an … Read more

Health Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Venue for Exploration

We are a group of researchers dedicated to linking the humanities and health sciences through student-centered research projects, innovative curricula, and public engagement. Our mission is to help prepare the next generation to think across disciplines, consult their values and passions, and tackle real-world problems to create meaningful social change.

Admissions for the English M.A. concentration in Literature, Medicine, and Culture are open every fall. In this interdisciplinary program, students can focus on Global Health; Medicine and the Arts; Constructions of Illness; Narrative Medicine; Race, Justice, and Health. Courses can be taken in departments across the university, including social medicine, anthropology, and English.