Annual Fellows Seminars bring faculty and occasionally graduate students together to explore topics that span the humanities, social sciences and the professions.
During the academic year 2012-2013, the DCII is supporting two Fellows Seminars. Participants in these Seminars are appointed as Fellows of the DCII for the full academic year.
Seminar One
Medicine and the Humanities: Suffering, Knowledge, and Culture
Co-organizers: Professor Dennis Foster (English, Dedman College) and Professor Carolyn Smith-Morris (Anthropology, Dedman College)
Description
This seminar addresses the growing interest in the humanistic dimensions of medicine. Medicine has a history and exists within history. It touches the subjective lives of practitioners and patients in ways that literature and the arts make visible and comprehensible. It shapes and is shaped by law and economics. It is therefore ripe for interdisciplinary consideration. This seminar focuses in particular on the topic of suffering which occurs at the point of meeting between the science of healing and the subjective experience of illness.
Seminar Participants/Fellows
Rhonda Blair (Theater, Meadows School)
Denise Dupont (World Languages/Spanish, Dedman College)
Robert Howell (Philosophy, Dedman College)
David Markham (MD, Cardiology, UT Southwestern)
Tom Mayo (Dedman School of Law)
Rajani Sudan (English, Dedman College)
Pia Vogel (Biology, Dedman College)
Associate Members/Fellows
John Harper (MD, Cardiology, Presbyterian)
Ron Schleifer (English/Adjunct Prof of Medicine, University of Oklahoma)
Seminar Two
“Thinking About Agency”
Co-organizers: Professor Alicia Meuret (Psychology, Dedman College) and Professor Lisa Siraganian (English, Dedman College)
Description
This seminar will explore the nature of agency (the capacity, condition, or state of acting or exerting power) across a range of disciplines. Among the central questions to be addressed are: what are the limits of agency in law, government, business, interpretive studies of culture or artistic creation; how does the role of technology in the 20th century alter the way we think about our ability to exert power or produce an end result; and what can be learned in one field to think about how agency works and operates in another.
Seminar Participants/Fellows
Philippe Chuard (Philosophy, Dedman College)
Michael Corris (Division of Art, Meadows School of the Arts)
Dayna Oscherwitz (World Languages/French, Dedman College)
Ulrike Schultze (Cox School of Business)
Thomas Siems (Lyle School of Engineering)
Sara Tran (Dedman School of Law)