Jefferson Humanities & Health

Tuesday, March 17, 12-1PM, Scott Memorial Library 200A. Lunch provided. Open to Jefferson students, faculty, and staff.

Join the Health Humanities Reading Group for a discussion of an article from the New England Journal of Medicine perspective roundtable, "Pursuing Health Equity in the United States with Crystal W. Cené, M.D., M.P.H., David A. Ansell, M.D., M.P.H., Merlin Chowkwanyun, M.P.H., Ph.D., and Lisa A.Cooper, M.D., M.P.H."

This Perspective Roundtable explores the current state of health inequities and the kinds of work that is being done to eliminate them, the effects of these efforts on medicine and health care, and what the tools and strategies and pathways are for us to reduce inequities in health and health care.

Access the Roundtable

Viewing time: 59 min and 19s

Facilitator: Ana Mari­a Lopez, MD, MPH, MACP, Professor and Vice Chair, Medical Oncology, Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Chief of Cancer Services, Jefferson Health New Jersey, Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.

About HHRG

The Health Humanities Reading Group (HHRG) gathers regularly to think critically about health as it is understood through various disciplinary perspectives, social contexts and value systems. This ongoing program is open to students, faculty and staff, and offers an informal learning environment facilitated by participants. Participants are expected to read, and come prepared to discuss, the text selected for each session.

Questions? Contact Kirsten Bowen, Humanities Program Coordinator.

Wednesday, March 18, 12-1PM, Jefferson Alumni Hall Eakins Lounge. Lunch provided. Open to Jefferson students, faculty, and staff.

The Jefferson Chamber Orchestra enables all members of the Jefferson community to play chamber music for both public and private audiences. The Chamber Orchestra has performed for weddings, cocktail parties, receptions, and private parties, including the SKMC White Coat Ceremony and Alumni Weekend. The group performs together at least four times each year at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and as part of the Dean's Concert Series. The Orchestra has been in existence for more than 10 years.

The Arrhythmias is an SSAA a capella choir dedicated to providing opportunities for the Jefferson community to sing and perform a capella music. The group performs regularly on and off campus in events like the Annual Jefferson Gala or Holiday caroling through the hospital. They also participate in the Philadelphia Med School Charity A Capella Concert and provide music at the TJU Scholarship dinner and other events. The Arrhythmias meet once a week for an hour to rehearse and prepare for concerts throughout the year. The Arrhythmias have been in existence for over 20 years. 

The Humanities Concert Series is made possible through a generous gift from Deborah L. August, MD, MPH, and Robert H. Rosenwasser, MD, FACS, FAHA

Questions? Contact Kirsten Bowen, Humanities Program Coordinator. 

Tuesday, March 24, 12-1PM, Scott Memorial Library 200A. Lunch provided. Open to Jefferson students. 

Join us for a discussion of the introduction and chapters 5 and 14 from There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness by M. Leona Godin.

There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind.” For millennia, blindness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil).

Godin—who began losing her vision at age ten—illuminates the often-surprising history of both the condition of blindness and the myths and ideas that have grown up around it over the course of generations. She combines an analysis of blindness in art and culture (from King Lear to Star Wars) with a study of the science of blindness and key developments in accessibility (the white cane, embossed printing, digital technology) to paint a vivid personal and cultural history.

A genre-defying work, There Plant Eyes reveals just how essential blindness and vision are to humanity’s understanding of itself and the world.

Copies of There Plant Eyes will be available for students after the discussion. 

Facilitator: Katherine Hubbard, MA, Teaching Instructor, JeffMD Humanities Selectives, Sidney Kimmel Medical College.

Participants are expected to read, and come prepared to discuss, the text selected for each session. To access the reading, participants must visit the Health Humanities Reading Group module in the Jefferson Humanities & Health organization on Canvas or the JMD 153 or the JMD 252 Asano Certificate courses on Canvas. Most Asano students are already users in these Humanities & Health Canvas courses. If that is not the case, participants may email Kirsten Bowen, Humanities Program Coordinator.

About the Health Humanities Reading Group:

The Health Humanities Reading Group gathers regularly to think critically about health as it is understood through various disciplinary perspectives, social contexts and value systems. This ongoing program is open to students, faculty and staff, and offers an informal learning environment facilitated by participants. Participants are expected to read, and come prepared to discuss, the text selected for each session.

Tuesday, March 24, JAH 207 5-6PM. Light refreshments provided. Open to Jefferson students, faculty, and staff.

Every person has a story. In this candid conversation series, we’ll talk with community members about their real experiences at the intersection of healthcare, wellbeing and identity. Each guest brings unique insights and expertise into problems of health that span social and clinical dimensions, and engage questions of access, equity and justice. Sessions will be led by an interprofessional team of Jefferson student moderators and include interactive Q&A with attendees.

Special Guest: Carol Campbell

"When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade" and no one has managed to do that better than, Ms. Carol Campbell. As she explains, she is currently in her 55th year at the University of Life, and she has acquired a wealth of experiences that she is willing to share with her audiences. She is quick to point out that her faith in God, her friends, and her two wonderful children have given her strength over years to face and conquer difficult challenges.

Born and raised in Jamaica, Carol migrated to the States in the early 90's. She started out in the Nursing Home/Personal Care industry as a cook and worked her way up to become an administrator. However, a series of unfortunate events left her a single mother of two with no means of financial support. She started cleaning houses, which she has now developed into a business. Her experiences with the health and social system in her new country were beyond challenging, but she is still smiling and always there to help others navigate the barriers, challenges, and overt discrimination they may face as they try to live their healthiest lives. Carol recently completed her Associate’s Degree and is now in her second term of the BA/Master’s Healthcare Administration program at Penn State Abington where she is excelling in all of her classes!es.

Community Voices is presented by the Jefferson College of Population Health, the Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Practice & Education, and Jefferson Humanities & Health.

Questions? Please contact Kirsten Bowen, Humanities Program Coordinator, Office of Student Affairs.

Conversation with the Author, Wednesday, March 25, 12-1 p.m., Jefferson Alumni Hall, Eakins Lounge, 1020 Locust Street, Philadelphia (Center City Campus). Lunch provided while supplies last.

Keynote Lecture, Wednesday, March 25 4-5 p.m., DEC Forum, Lawrence N. Field DEC Center, 4201 Henry Avenue, Philadelphia (East Falls Campus)

Both events free and open to all.

At the core of the novel Blackouts is the imagined deathbed conversations between a young, unnamed narrator (referred to as Nene) and his friend and elder, Juan Gay. As Juan waits for his end, the two recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion, resurrecting loves, lives, mothers, fathers, and minor heroes. Juan shares his tattered and redacted copy of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, and passes on his final wish: that Nene complete the story of Jan Gay, the real-life researcher whose early-20th-century interviews with queer people across the United States and Europe offered the foundation of Sex Variants, but whose contributions ended up being eclipsed—and all but erased—by the scientists whose legitimacy she required to publish her work. A dream-like and genre-defying creation, Blackouts incorporates erasure, photographs, testimony, illustrations, imaginary screenplays, and more as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made.

Justin Torres is a novelist celebrated for a distinctly lyrical style that weaves truth and fiction, blending genres as he explores queer art, love, lineage, life, and death—and the multifaceted dynamics between family, friends, mentors, and strangers—through narrative. He is the author of Blackouts, winner of the 2023 National Book Award, and the instant contemporary queer classic We the Animals, which was translated into fifteen languages and adapted into a feature film. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Torres was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and was a recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, LA Times Image Magazine, and Best American Essays. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA. He is at work on a new novel.

During 2025-2026, the Jefferson Humanities Forum hosts multidisciplinary scholars and thinkers to investigate the theme of Trust.

Co-presented by Jefferson Humanities & Health, the Philadelphia University Honors Institute at Thomas Jefferson University and the College of Humanities & Sciences as part of their Dietrich V. Asten Lecture Series, an endowed series established to sponsor lectures in the humanities, sciences, government and the arts.

Questions? Contact Kirsten Bowen, Humanities Program Coordinator.

Wednesday, March 25, 12-1PM, Zoom

The Schwartz Rounds Program provides a regular open forum for a multidisciplinary discussion of the psychosocial and emotional aspects of working in healthcare. Each session is organized around a compelling theme or patient story, and includes both clinical and nonclinical panelists and participants.

This is not a Jefferson Humanities & Health event but credit is available for the Asano Humanities & Health Certificate.

Thursday, March 26, 12-1PM, Scott Memorial Library, 200A. Lunch provided. Open to Jefferson students, faculty and staff.

Join us to discuss anti-racism in relation to food, foodways, veganism and cookbooks.

The Health Humanities Reading Group will discuss anti-racism in relation to food, foodways, veganism and cookbooks. Marilisa Navarro, PhD, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Provost of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, College of Humanities and Sciences, Thomas Jefferson University, will lead a discussion of her article "Radical Recipe: Veganism as Anti-Racism," which considers how two cookbooks—Afro-Vegan by Bryant Terry and Decolonize Your Diet by Luz Calvo and Catriona Esquibel—go beyond conveying recipes to produce knowledge, critique racism and colonialism, deconstruct the white-centric veganism narrative, and highlight the voices, histories and experiences of people of color.

Reading: Marilisa C. Navarro, “Radical Recipe: Veganism as Anti-Racism”
Time: 18 min read

Facilitator: Marilisa C. Navarro, PhD, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Provost of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, College of Humanities and Sciences, Thomas Jefferson University.

Participants are expected to read, and come prepared to discuss, the selected reading. To access the reading, participants must visit the Anti-Racism in Health Focus module of the Jefferson Humanities & Health organization on Canvas and or the JMD 153 or the JMD 252 Asano Certificate courses on Canvas.

Questions or difficulty accessing the reading? Contact Kirsten Bowen, Humanities Program Coordinator.

Friday, March 27, 9AM-5PM, East Falls Campus, DEC Center, 2nd Floor, Rooms 211/212, 4201 Henry Street, and Virtual. 

Marking its sixth year, the International Neurodiversity & the Built Environment Symposium explores how design can honor diverse sensory, cognitive, and relational experiences. This year’s theme, Building Empathy, invites cross‑disciplinary practitioners, researchers, artists, and self‑advocates to rethink how environments can support dignity, agency, and belonging. The symposium examines how empathetic, art‑informed approaches can move beyond accommodation toward more caring, collaborative, and human‑centered futures.

Presented by the Synesthetic Research and Design Lab, College of Architecture & the Built Environment, in collaboration with the Jefferson Health Center for Autism and Neurodiversity. The event is generously sponsored by Cigna Healthcare, Heckendorn Shiles Architects (HSA), HOK, and Perkins&Will.

This is not a Jefferson Humanities & Health event but credit is available for the Asano Humanities & Health Cerificate.

Friday, March 27, Hamilton Lobby, 12-1PM. Free and open to all.

Join us for a conversation and hands-on tour of the Helix Gallery exhibition Touching Feeling with textile artists Linda Ruggiero and Sugandha Gupta.

Both artists use textile practice to create works that honor embodied knowledge and challenge conventional modes of perception. Ruggiero draws from her experience as a critical care nurse, using the rhythm of weaving to process the emotional weight of trauma and caregiving. Gupta's artistic vocabulary is rooted in touch, sound, and sensation, informed by her lived experience of albinism and visual impairment. Her multi-sensory textiles deliberately resist the visual primacy of contemporary culture, inviting audiences to experience art through their strongest perceptual abilities. Both artists use fiber's tactile properties to express what words cannot fully capture, from emotional trauma to sensory experience. Together, their textiles create spaces of embodied understanding—spaces you're invited to explore not just with your eyes, but through touch.

Sugandha Gupta is Assistant Professor of Fashion Design and Materiality at Parsons School of Design. Born with Albinism and visually impaired, Gupta creates Sensory-Textiles, a collection of textiles and wearables that engage audiences through their sense of touch, sound, smell, and sight. Over nearly twenty years, Gupta’s work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the United Nations Headquarters, American Craft Council, and the Smithsonian Craft Show, among other venues.

Linda Ruggiero is a Philadelphia-based nurse and textile artist whose sculptural fiber work is informed by her experiences in critical care at a Level I trauma center. As a clinically practicing nurse with doctoral training in neuroscience, she uses color psychology and tactile materiality to create textiles that tell stories of grief, trauma, and healing. In June 2025, she presented her first solo exhibition, Woven Stories, at Da Vinci Art Alliance in Philadelphia.

Monday, March 30, 12-1PM, Scott Memorial Library 200A. Luch provided. Open to Jefferson students.

Join us for a discussion of the short story "Et in Bellicus Lunarum Medicalis" from the The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington.

Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life.

Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), The Complete Stories captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist’s life.

Copies of The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington will be available for students after the discussion. Lunch will be provided.

Facilitator: Katherine Hubbard, MA, Teaching Instructor, JeffMD Humanities Selectives, Sidney Kimmel Medical College.

Participants are expected to read, and come prepared to discuss, the text selected for each session. To access the reading, participants must visit the Health Humanities Reading Group module in the Jefferson Humanities & Health organization on Canvas or the JMD 153 or the JMD 252 Asano Certificate courses on Canvas. Most Asano students are already users in these Humanities & Health Canvas courses. If that is not the case, participants may email Kirsten Bowen, Humanities Program Coordinator.

About the Health Humanities Reading Group:

The Health Humanities Reading Group gathers regularly to think critically about health as it is understood through various disciplinary perspectives, social contexts and value systems. This ongoing program is open to students, faculty and staff, and offers an informal learning environment facilitated by participants. Participants are expected to read, and come prepared to discuss, the text selected for each session.

Monday, March 30, 5-6PM, Online. Open to Jefferson students.

In order to effectively care for others, we must first learn to care for ourselves. This virtual workshop will introduce you to a variety of music-based experiences designed to promote healthy stress management and burnout prevention. Facilitated by Peggy Tileston, MT-BC.

About the Creative Approaches to Self-Care Series

In order to care effectively for others, we must first learn to care for ourselves. This interdisciplinary series is designed to engage students in self-care practices that promote healthy stress management and burnout prevention. Workshops will address topics including how to cope with stress and anxiety, cultivate relaxation techniques, find balance and develop self-compassion.

Please note: This workshop is virtual and open to Jefferson students only; pre-registration required. A Zoom link will be provided in the Eventbrite order confirmation and the event reminder from Eventbrite, which will be emailed 48 hours before the event. If you do not receive the Zoom link, please contact Kirsten Bowen.

Co-presented with the Student Counseling Center (SCC)