Health Humanities

Founded in 2014 by Dr. Cora Fox and Sally Kitch, the Health Humanities initiative was created to promote research and interdisciplinary collaborations that center humanities scholarship addressing health as a cultural idea, value and practice. Its mission is to guide and support public discussions about health equity, justice, and access, and to explore creative cultural approaches to promoting care for all.

Dr. Cora Fox served as co-director of the imitative for 12 years before being promoted to associate dean of humanities in the School of Medicine and Advanced Medical Engineering. The initiative continues under the leadership of Dr. Annika Mann, who joined Dr. Cora Fox as co-director in 2023. From hosting its first event in 2015 to presenting research at the Health Humanities Consortium Conference in 2025, Health Humanities continues to explore topics such as illness, mortality and the body; ethics of care and wellbeing; politics of representation and distribution of health resources; historical, current and systemic structures of healthcare; and the influence of stigmas and stereotypes in healthcare.

The Health Humanities initiative currently organizes and sponsors events to build research capacity and public engagement with the field and contributes to an interdisciplinary undergraduate certificate in Health Humanities that is available for students pursuing any major at ASU, with more curricular programs, including those for the School of Medicine and Advanced Medical Engineering, in development.

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Email Annika Mann at [email protected] to join the mailing list or collaborate on events.

Initiative Director

Dr. Annika Mann is an Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in Disability Studies at ASU’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies. She a literary historian with research interests in the history of medicine, the health humanities, and disability studies. Broadly, her work explores the intersections of cultures of reading and conceptions of health and care in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of "Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print" (University of Virginia Press, 2018) and the co-editor of "Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts Among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations" (Rutgers University Press, 2018) as well as journal articles and book chapters on topics such as eighteenth-century print culture and contagious disease, revolution and bodily regeneration, and authorial labor and physical disability. Her current book project, "Stillness: Chronic Illness and Romantic Narrative Art," explores how early nineteenth-century women writers use their experience of chronic illness to reshape the temporal possibilities of narrative art.

If there is anything the global experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed, it is that human health is shaped by and depends on cultural practices and values. Although health is often equated with biomedicine and assumed to be the focus of research exclusively in the medical and sometimes behavioral sciences, it cannot be adequately understood or supported without attention to the narratives, values and cultural products and institutions that human communities create and uphold. These building blocks of cultures of health are the focus of the humanities and the qualitative social sciences, and human flourishing greatly depends on them.

Health Humanities works to promote research and interdisciplinary collaborations — between the university, community networks, and clinical partners — that address health as a cultural idea, value and practice. Its fundamental mission is to guide and support public discussions about health equity, justice, and access, and to explore creative cultural approaches to promoting care for all.

Scholars, professionals, artists and activists working with Health Humanities bring their expertise to analyzing various cultural forces:

the stories told about illness, mortality, and the body;
the ethics of care and wellbeing;
the politics of representation and distribution of health resources;
the way history generates and informs current structures of healthcare and the clinic;
and the myriad ways stigmas, stereotypes and language or cultural difference influence and can undermine access to medical resources and just systems of care.

Health Humanities includes researchers working in the established fields of narrative medicine, bioethics, philosophy of science, biocultural studies, history of medicine, translation studies, and disability studies. In concert with those studying embodiment, particularly in scholarly communities addressing race, class, gender, and sexuality, it also seeks to develop research capacity in these fields. It also supports those who are focused on reforming healthcare training and practice and working to promote structural awareness, diversity and cultural humility in the health professions.

We currently organize and sponsor events to build research capacity and public engagement with the field and offer an interdisciplinary undergraduate certificate in Health Humanities that is available for students pursuing any major at ASU, with more curricular programs in development.

Health Humanities

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Get Involved

Initiative Director