A few days ago—or maybe it was weeks, time after all has been out of joint lately—my colleague, Tim Morton, tweeted something interesting. It seems to have sincebeen deleted, so I’ll have to paraphrase it from a memory whose reliability has already been called into question. But Morton said something like this: the humanities are…
Author: Travis Alexander
I'm a lecturer in Medical Humanities at Rice University, where I am also affiliate faculty in the Center for the Study of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Program in Science and Technology Studies. My research interests include immunity, psychoanalysis, race, sexuality, aesthetics, and the government of life. Writing on those subjects has appeared in African American Review, American Literature, boundary 2, Catalyst, Criticism, Literature and Medicine, Public Culture, and elsewhere. I'm completing a book called A Glamorous Nightmare: HIV/AIDS, American Literature, and the Viral Power of Whiteness.
Degraded Life, Euthanasia, and the Health Humanities
Canada has recently been at the forefront of a global interest in liberalizing policies around Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), or the legalization of euthanasia. What has made Canada’s approach unique, even compared to familiar northern European champions of the practice, such as Belgium and the Netherlands, is its availability to people not suffering from…
Translational Humanities for Public Health: An Introduction
In today’s post, I want to chronicle the experiences of a project led by Rice University’s Medical Futures Lab, and which I have been lucky to work on since the fall of 2020. It’s called the Translational Humanities for Public Health (THPH) project. I believe it mirrors the ambitions and methods of Synapsis in certain…
Griswold and Its Discontents: A Provocation
In June 2022, the US Supreme Court reversed a half century of judicial precedent in ruling that there is no longer constitutional right to an abortion in this country. In the weeks after a draft opinion of Dobbs leaked, activist and scholarly discourse on the Left quickly turned to the next decisions likely imperiled by…