Graphic Medicine is an emerging national movement in the health humanities that explores how we can use silly things to understand serious things, by combining comics with medicine.
A Duke House Course
I developed and co-teach a half-credit course on graphic medicine for Duke undergraduates, which explores the use of comics and graphic novels in medicine and health. It teaches students to analyze and learn to communicate experiences surrounding illness through drawing, comics, and stories. The class is approved institutionally and sponsored and advised by Duke's Trent Center for Medical Humanities. I created the syllabus, course structure, graded all assignments, and lead every class with my co-instructor.
I worked with a team of faculty to create the curriculum of a new medical summer program for Duke undergraduates, called Reimagining Medicine, an arts and humanities medical program for pre-health undergraduates at Duke that aimed at exploring - reimagining - medicine through puppetry, comics, improv, and more. I co-taught a series of workshops that created spaces for the cohort of students to interrogate health culture through graphic medicine. The program will be held annually, you can read more about it here.
Reimagining Medicine
Graphic Med Gallery
I curated, had work in, and organized the first ever graphic medicine gallery at Duke, bringing together the creative work of faculty from the medical center, med students, and undergraduate students in the narrative and graphic medicine community. The gallery was on display for a month in 2019 in the student center at Duke University.
Myself and co-curator Omar Khan, who is also my co-instructor for the Graphic Medicine house course and module in Reimagining Medicine. | The entryway to the gallery, located in the Bryan Student Center on Duke's west campus. | Community members viewing the gallery during the opening reception. |
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The gallery was a collective body of work, featuring the stories and drawings of students from Duke's undergraduate student body, the medical school, and Duke Hospital. | The panels from each artists comics were enlarged and put on display, accompanied by a self portrait from the artist and a short bio. |