Sandra Sufian receives National Endowment for the Humanities grant
DHD associate professor Sandra Sufian is the recipient of a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Initiatives for Hispanic-Serving Institutions program, a mechanism intended to strengthen the teaching and study of the humanities in higher education. The proposal, one of 11 recipients, received a perfect score.
Sufian’s project, “The Human Story of Illness: Health Humanities Portraits for Physicians in Training,” establishes a series of faculty development workshops over two years in which a core group of University of Illinois College of Medicine (UI-COM) and affiliated faculty (including DHD associate professor Carrie Sandahl) will develop “health humanities portraits” for use in medical school curricula.
Combining patient narratives and scholarship from distinctive, humanities disciplinary perspectives, the project’s innovative approach deliberately distinguishes itself from clinical case development-- with its sole emphasis on symptoms, diseases and diagnoses-- by primarily probing instead the human dimensions of illness, disease and disability. In-so-doing, the project will demonstrate the critical role of the humanities in understanding health and healthcare dilemmas and in training physicians. The project also builds an online repository, enabling health humanities faculty nationwide to contribute their own portraits for collaborative exchange, and ultimately to establish best-practices for portrait development and teaching.
Sufian, who is the Principal Investigator, is also associate professor of Health Humanities and History in the Department of Medical Education at UI-COM and associate professor. She is also affiliated faculty in the UIC History Department and in the UIC School of Public Health.
For NEH announcement, see: www.neh.gov