Curriculum & Courses

Narrative competence is a crucial dimension of health-care delivery, the capacity to attend and respond to stories of illness, and the narrative skills to reflect critically on the scene of care. Narrative Medicine explores and builds the clinical applications of literary knowledge. How are illnesses emplotted? Does suffering belong to a genre? Can a medical history be co-narrated in order to redistribute ownership and authority? The objectives of this Core course include furthering close reading skills, and exploring theories of self-telling and relationality. How do we give and receive accounts of self? What are the implications for our understanding of the clinical encounter? In examining the complexities of this exchange we will turn to narrative theory, performance theory, autobiographical theory, psychoanalytic theory, and the nexus of narrative and identity. Readings will include works by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maggie Nelson, Toni Morrison, W.G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, Judith Butler, Jonathan Shay and others, and an assortment of readings in narrative theory, trauma scholarship and witnessing literature. The Witnessing assignment offers the opportunity to function as witness of the clinical encounter, exploring themes of witnessing and relationality. The in-class Workshop portion of the class is designed to offer experience with writing to a prompt and responding to others’ writing, and to help prepare students for the Practicum (should they choose to take it) by offering the opportunity to craft prompts and to act as facilitator of the group.

In this class we will explore the act of writing: how it is done, what it is for, how it works on our minds and bodies, and how it can be used to engender meaningful change in the clinical context. What really happens to one in the act and wake of writing? We will examine this question through the explorations of writers and thinkers as well as through our own practice and close study of the craft. At the end of the course students should have, in addition to a better understanding of their own strengths, weaknesses, and instincts as writers, a working knowledge of how and why to write with others in a clinical context.

Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of illness and disability autobiographies as a unique field of literary and sociological study. Autobiographies written by individuals experiencing illness bring to the fore issues of subjectivity and embodiment, while simultaneously reflecting larger social, political, and cultural realities. This course introduces the field of illness and disability autobiography as well as prominent scholarship in this field. The primary goal of the course is to examine issues of embodiment and voice in illness narratives. The course will examine the relationship between illness and disability narratives and their familial, social, and institutional contexts. Finally, this course addresses the issue of “personal to political” narratives—illness and disability narratives as they relate to broader advocacy and activism. As narrative is both analytical and practical, this course combines theoretical articles with a variety of illness autobiographies and illness narratives. 

Who is the Other? What is the nature of the relationship between oneself and the Other—the intersubjective relationship? Is this relationship immediate or mediated? If mediated, by what? Can I ever truly know the Other? If so, how? What does “knowing” the Other mean? What is the role of language in the intersubjective relationship? This class explores “intersubjectivity” and the “Other” as terms central to the study of Narrative Medicine. Students examine various ways of conceptualizing these terms, from Cartesianism, Hegelianism, Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and other traditions. Through this exploration of intersubjectivity and Otherness, the class challenges our assumptions about the nature of the clinical encounter, with a view toward better understanding the ways that Narrative Medicine might foster authentic intersubjective, empathetic relationships between clinicians and patients.

As students learn the principles and practices of Narrative Medicine, qualitative research methods become essential tools in assessing the impact of those principles and practices. The nature of most narrative medicine work - group process around writing, group facilitation, attentive listening, formulating probing questions to move conversations in more layered directions, sharing and responding to text - lends itself to qualitative research investigation and evaluation. Thus, this course will focus on qualitative methods of inquiry and analysis using structured observation and ethnographically informed semi-structured in-depth interviews. Students will read and discuss examples of qualitative studies and will have practical experience in executing individual interviews. Throughout, students will acquire the skills to delineate the connections between qualitative research methods and practice and those of Narrative Medicine and to learn how to use qualitative methods in evaluating their Narrative Medicine practice. Open to Narrative Medicine M.S. students only.

The class exercises are "Low Risk Introductory Research Methodology Exercises" intended to build capacity and skill, and as such are exempt from IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval. Accordingly, any human subjects information gathered as part of class exercises/projects must be destroyed at the end of the semester, and cannot be shared/disseminated in any form, including (but not limited to) written articles/papers; conference posters; oral presentations; seminars, etc. Nor can it be retroactively integrated into subsequent IRB-approved research projects. Even if the specific data from such exercises is not shared, any form of general reference cannot be disseminated in any manner or context beyond the classroom. Once such dissemination occurs, the findings are considered generalizable research, which puts the student in non-compliant violation of IRB regulations. This applies to all courses as well as Independent Study and Capstone projects within the Narrative Medicine M.S. program. The focus in our program, as in other comparable Master’s level programs, is on learning about how such projects are conducted and learning some of the skills necessary to conduct such projects in the future.

What is the meaning of embodiment? For most of us, it seems this is a question we only confront when our bodies “break down,” “fail,” or “betray” us. In truth, however, it is a question we are answering with every intentional movement, feeling, impulse and desire of our conscious life. In this course, we will explore various approaches to embodiment from contemporary thinkers. We will ask what these approaches might tell us about the experience of illness and how they might inform our understanding of care, both of ourselves and others.

In this course, students will study certain masterpieces of art in museum galleries, and then together in the classroom we will explore the significance of those masterpieces, projected necessarily onto the history of art. The progression takes us from the fundamentals of close-looking to the mapping of understanding and meaning, from the development of interpretative capacities to exploration of the immense and layered lives of artworks. Among those examined are masterpieces by Piero della Francesca, Giovanni Bellini, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, and Jackson Pollock. The chief purpose of this course is to learn how to experience the phenomena of being full activated in the presence of an artwork, startled into awareness, and awakened in the deepest sense to art and to ourselves.

From Frankenstein to AI, from Brave New World to Gattaca—this course draws upon literature, film and criticism to explore the ways in which popular culture both reflects and informs our understanding of bioethics. We will investigate the reciprocity between narrative—understood as the form and means of storytelling—and ethics, particularly in the domain of illness, bioethics, and medical practice. Topics include superheroes and disability studies; the Outbreak narrative in literature, film, and current events; the ethics of clinician writing, and the thematic connections between contemporary debates concerning vaccination and the story of Dracula.

Narrative medicine, its practice and scholarship, is necessarily concerned with issues of trauma, body, memory, voice, and inter-subjectivity. However, to grapple with these issues, we must locate them in their social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Narrative understanding helps unpack the complex power relations between North and South, state and worker, disabled body and able body, bread-earner and child-bearer, as well as self and the other (or, even, selves and others). If disease, violence, terror, war, poverty, and oppression manifest themselves narratively, then resistance, justice, healing, activism, and collectivity can equally be products of a narrative-based approach to ourselves and the world. This course explores the connections between narrative, health, and social justice. In doing so, it broadens the mandate of narrative medicine, challenging each of us to bring a critical, self-reflective eye to our scholarship, teaching, practice, and organizing. How are the stories we tell, and are told, manifestations of social injustice? How can we transform such stories into narratives of justice, health, and change?

This course explores representations of the impact of structural racism on health and health outcomes. In this endeavor, this course examines historical issues and theories, emphasizes critical analysis and the application of knowledge, and asks critical questions about authors’ decisions to depict illness and health in specific ways. Scholarly readings in the areas of narrative and critical race theory will not only illuminate the relationship between social conditions and health outcomes but also provide the necessary insights and concepts to articulate how authors and directors represent health risks and outcomes in cultural contexts. Written and visual texts will provide a context for reflecting on specific personal and cultural experiences with structural racism and the narrative strategies that authors employ to depict the effects of structural racism on African American bodies.

Kierkegaard writes that human beings, diverse in experiences and backgrounds, have kinship of life and kinship of death. The events of birth and death place us in a relation because “no thinker grasps life as death does.” Given these kinships and death’s proximity to life, how do we understand our own relation to death and dying, and the death and dying of others? What is the definition of death, its genealogy, and how has it been constructed classically, historically, and in modernity? How do we respond to the death and dying of those we see or witness in our own lifeworld and the death and dying of those we do not see? These are among the questions that motivate this course, which turns to an array of global (western and nonwestern) philosophical, medical, social, legal, literary, religious, and transnational texts (of all forms) and narratives to address questions, issues and topics related to death and dying, and the ways in which sustained study and reflection on death and dying can improve the clinical encounter, care, and the plain of ethical and moral inquiry and decision making in an unequal world. As Benjamin tells us, "Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual, and a most exemplary one," and death "is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can tell," its source of authority. In addition to guest lectures by clinicians and caregivers, narratives by patients and families, review of case studies, international treaties, scholarly literature, and current developments, we will trace, pressure, and write about varying discourses of death and think about and respond to death and dying in the narratives and example of Plato, Descartes, Simone de Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, John McGahern, Leo Tolstoy, Walter Benjamin, Kierkegaard, and others. How does the self/other relation and obligation look when we center death and dying? Further, how do we take a discourse on death and dying and apply it to our own lives, professions, and ways of being in the world?   

This course is a follow-up to the prerequisite Applied Writing in the Narrative Medicine Context and Beyond (NMED PS5990) and will serve as an elective for those students who wish to develop creative projects and to further cement their facility with the language of craft and modes of storytelling. We will focus intensely on the student work—bringing in outside texts only as they relate to individual student projects—and will push students not only to further their own writing but to meaningfully engage with their classmates’ projects and develop their capacity as thinkers and responders to the craft of stories. Pre-requisite: Applied Writing in the Narrative Medicine Context and Beyond (NMED PS5990).

Literary and cultural understandings of colonialism, borderlands, diaspora, identity and home deepen health and humanities scholarship. Indeed, theorists such as Arthur Frank have argued that it is the liminal, in-between-ness of the illness experience that make meaningless previously held senses of time and space. Illness, disability, indeed, any host of embodied changes demand a new story, a new destination and map to life’s journey. Illness, disabilities and other identities at the embodied borderlands, then, are akin to a new sort of diaspora, a sort of belonging to nowhere and everywhere that brings with it a unique insight into the human experience. In the words of Marcel Proust, “the real voyage of discovery consists not of seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” This seminar will explore the relationship between embodied borderlands and Narrative Medicine by reading (and viewing) diasporic fictions concerned with health and illness, witnessing and memory, identity and intersubjectivity, the real and the uncanny. In addition, we will examine the intersections between cultural theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, disability theory, and critical race feminist theory to understand how these fields deepen the work of narrative medicine.

The Practicum applies the skills of close reading in the workshop setting. Students are matched in dyad pairs to facilitate a series of six close reading and reflective writing workshops at select community partner sites. Throughout the semester students work with course instructors to hone facilitation techniques and to plan and deliver workshops. Attention is focused on skills such as: close reading; recognizing implicit bias; negotiating power and space; co-facilitation; building trust; fostering participation; establishing and measuring goals; reflecting on practice; and listening and responding to group members’ contributions with interest, care, and respect. Throughout the semester, guest speakers will offer additional insight into clinical applications of narrative medicine. Pre-requisite: Close Reading: Giving and Receiving Accounts of Self (NMED PS5020).

Our interpersonal experiences and the personal identities we hold both shape and contribute to our individual concepts of health, as well as to our awareness of the beliefs and identities held by others.  This course examines how various marginalized groups have historically organized and advocated to bring about change in communities impacted by health disparities and social injustice.  How can understanding their stories and the strategies they've implemented to construct, share, and collect their narratives, inform health professionals and their allies in developing new and innovative approaches to hear, interpret, and respond to the needs of the communities they are charged with serving?  At a time when a renewed focus is being placed on health equity, social justice, race, bias, resource distribution, and access, it is imperative to look more closely at the experiences of communities and the individuals within them who have been placed at greater vulnerability.  With an attentiveness to intersectionality, critical race theory, and media studies, course materials will guide an exploration of narrative and its relationship to activism, advocacy, and messaging around community health.  

Whether alone with ourselves, or in close relationships with important people in our lives, dominant narratives shape our encounters by bringing certain aspects of our experience to the fore and marginalizing others. Narrative Therapy is a school of thought developed by Michael White, the Australian psychotherapist and social activist. Influenced by Social Constructionism and the writings of Michel Foucault (among others), White sought to understand the ways in which systems of power and control on the societal level shape our most intimate experiences. There is a price we pay for the hegemony of dominant narratives (as Foucault would say) as other aspects of our experience become marginalized and pushed out of awareness in this process. But by analyzing the dynamics by which certain narratives come to hold sway over us, and by considering what goes missing from our experience, Narrative Therapy seeks to undo this price by re-evaluating the stories we live by so that they can be more expansive and less limiting. In this course we will look at the basic concepts and theoretical underpinnings of Narrative Therapy, and then begin to understand the essential techniques and areas of application of this important therapeutic school. This course does not train students to practice therapy. Our emphasis instead will be on developing ideas for ways in which the concepts and techniques introduced by Narrative Therapy can inform the practice of Narrative Medicine. Questions we will address include: What can we learn from Narrative Therapy about the ways people structure stories about themselves, and how does this affect their relationship with their bodies, with illness and their conceptions of healing? What are the mechanisms by which dominant narratives from the social sphere are integrated into an individual’s self concept, and how does this then influence power relations in the clinical encounter? Theorists within Narrative Therapy strive to foster a non-hierarchical, non-expert stance in the clinical encounter. What are the possibilities and the challenges inherent in maintaining this?

This course is intended and designed to provide a focus on disability as distinct from illness. Disability Studies approaches disability not as an attribute of an individual's body or mind but as a social relation that creates disadvantages for some people and privileges others based on the presence or absence of stigmatized physical and mental differences. Disability studies provides a critical framework to examine the social practices, cultural representations in various media, and public policies through which shared understandings of disability are developed and expressed, reproduced, contested and reimagined. This course draws on various disciplinary perspectives to understand the broad and complex phenomenon of disability in historical perspective, as represented in literature and culture, and especially as it impinges on medical scenarios.

The recent racial and economic disparities of the COVID-19 pandemic and the terror of violent policing in the United States, often framed as a “public health crisis,” have sharpened a long-standing need for informed activist writing in the public sphere. Although the constraints of writing for public-facing venues are many (time, tone, length, presentation of findings), the need for writers with cultural and narrative fluency in medicine is difficult to overstate. Students in this one-credit elective course will study and practice how to write from qualitative research for a public audience. Over three weeks, we will delve into the scholarly and public writing of academics whose work moves between the social and the scientific, studying the rhetorical choices in both kinds of writing, and observing effective techniques for deep engagement and strategies for of-the-moment occasional pieces, fiction, documentary, and long-form journalism. A visit with a climate change and health reporter will provide an opportunity to ask questions about the journalistic practices that link these fields. The class will consider writerly decision-making in times of urgency and crisis, and help students build sustainable research practices that can be called upon in such times. We will also discuss systems for self-editing and responding to editorial comments and pressures. The final project for the course will be a researched op-ed or short essay on a current health-related matter and an accompanying pitch to a national magazine or newspaper.

All Narrative Medicine M.S. students are welcome—there are no pre-requisites for this course.

This course will explore the conjunction illness-thought-activism in time. In particular, we will focus our investigations on the medical, political, and aesthetic responses to the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics. We will use the historical example of the emergence of HIV/AIDS and the increasing politicization of the illness as a lens through which to examine the ongoing emergence of COVID-19. We will explore how these illnesses are treated in a variety of texts—medical, media, and activist documents, as well as literature, film, and other forms of creative expression. In the most general terms, we are interested in being, doing, and becoming in relation to illness experiences and events, therapeutic thought and practices, and clinical and caring institutions and spaces. The course is structured to move from the phenomenological experience of the ill body in the world to the way global structures affect that particular experience and back again. Thus, on the one hand, we will look at various relationships within the institution of medicine: between doctors and patients, patients and nurses, doctors and nurses, etc. As we analyze these various relationships, we will consider the way knowledge, power, and choice gets expressed in and through these relationships. On the other hand, we will expand out from those specific relationships within medicine to larger global structures that affect the health of peoples throughout the world, historically and in the present. We will explore biopolitical issues, including the social determinants of health and structural violence that means some people are at greater risk for illness and premature death than others. Some of our organizing questions for the semester include: why and how is illness political?; what factors impact health?; what constitutes good care?; and how can we better deliver care throughout the world?

This course takes a short, intensive dive into the narratives that story our experience of and with dementia. “Dementia Narratives” will use the literary genres of film, fiction, memoir, and graphic novels to excavate dementia stories using three framing tools. First, we will consider the relationship between the storyteller and the person with dementia, and the positioning of the person with dementia in the context of the story. Second, we will attend to these stories as they are framed by metaphors. And third, as we attend to these narratives we will also connect them to implications for practice and policy. In Narrative Medicine we focus on story and its importance in understanding the experience of illness for the individual, for the family or community, and for society. In this course we explore the elephant in that room: the importance of the illness experiences that cannot be narrated. Can we use the skills we gain in close reading and reflective writing to better understand the relationship between memory and self, when memory is inconsistent, free-floating, and riddled with holes? The purpose of this exploration is to better serve the needs of those whose stories do not fit the expected arcs of coherence, to understand the world of the caregivers for those with dementia, and to consider how narrative and policy inform each other in this growing arena of societal need. These questions and topics hover at the edges of current courses such as “Illness/Disability Narratives,” but are generally not directly addressed.

2-4 points (credits)

The Narrative Medicine Capstone Project may be taken for two, three, or four points (credits) depending on the work involved as determined with the advisor. Students may propose a Capstone Project topic based on their past experience and future professional or academic goals, providing the opportunity for in-depth investigation of a particular topic of interest. Examples include: curriculum, program design, or program evaluation projects; creative projects; publishable articles, etc. A Capstone may only be taken once. It is not required for completion of the program.

1-4 points (credits)

Narrative Medicine Independent Study may be taken for one to four points (credits) depending on the work involved as determined with the advisor. Students may propose an Independent Study topic based on their past experience and future professional or academic goals, providing the opportunity for in-depth investigation of a particular topic of interest. Examples include: curriculum, program design, or program evaluation projects; creative projects; publishable articles, etc. Independent Study is not required for completion of the program.