Humanities Department Showcases Scholarship at National Conference

L-R: Cory Wetterlin, Maria Rankin-Brown, Augusto Silvitzke, Laura Miller, Duane Covrig, Scott Calhoun, and Dave Price

Professors in the Humanities and Social Sciences department presented at the Health Humanities Consortium Conference in Indianapolis, Ind., which ran from April 8-11, 2026. The department collaboratively presented a 75-minute roundtable entitled “Health Literacy and Justice: Building Trust as the Foundation for Ethical Care.” As a group, they shared insights for how justice-informed care practices can be developed in each of their disciplines to transfer into the larger field of healthcare.

Two professors also presented individually. Laura Miller presented on “The Rhetoric of the White Coat.” She focused on how her course in ‘Medicine in Media’ provides a lens for students to examine the ways media portrayals of healthcare set expectations for when individuals encounter real healthcare providers.  

Additionally, Scott Calhoun presented a talk titled “I Gotta Do Something: Poetic Justice in the Songs of U2 for Healthcare Education” to demonstrate how engaging art through close reading and listening of music increases a student’s ability to understand and care for patients, and use their affective responses to art for making real-world improvements to the healthcare landscape. 

The conference’s theme of “Health Justice: So it Goes?”  tied directly to the literature of author Kurt Vonnegut (an Indy native) and provided the Humanities and Social Sciences department a focus for their presentation. The Health Humanities Consortium is “an international group that promotes health humanities scholarship, education, and practices at the intersection of the humanities, arts, and social sciences in health, illness, and healthcare,” according to its website.

Print This Page