Narrative Medicine Rounds Columbia University

For our December Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Maura Spiegel, who teaches literature and film at Columbia University and Barnard College. She is co-director of the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Humanities and Ethics at Vagelos Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, where she also teaches a film course to first-year medical students. She has lectured on Narrative Medicine in Venice, London, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Baroda, India, and in cities around the U.S. She co-authored The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2017); The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying and Living on (Anchor/Doubleday), The Breast Book: An Intimate and Curious History (Workman), which was a Book-of-the-Month Club-Quality Paperbacks selection; she edited and introduced new editions of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes for the Barnes & Noble Classics Series. With Rita Charon, MD, PhD, she edited the journal Literature and Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press) for seven years. She has written for The New York Times and Newsday and has published articles on the history of the emotions, Charles Dickens, Victorian fashion, diamonds in the movies, among many other topics. Her new book Sidney Lumet: A Life, a biography of legendary American film director Sidney Lumet, is published by St. Martin’s Press.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. These events are free and open to the public.

For our November Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Deborah Levy, the acclaimed author of six novels including Swimming Home and Hot Milk, both nominated for the Booker Prize, and most recently The Man Who Saw Everything, to be published in the USA in October 2019. Levy will be speaking about “Hypochondria and History: Searching for Story.”
About her novel Hot Milk, Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad And Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present, said: “A hot Attic sun glares down on Levy’s novel, imbuing her mere mortals with a mythic dimension and exposing the monsters within. Maternal hysteria here is more toxic to a daughter who struggles to leave home and become woman than the floating jellyfish that choke the sea. Only Elena Ferrante writes of the seepages of illness and woman’s identity in the family with equal insight. As gripping as it is unputdownable, Hot Milk is a novel by a writer at the peak of her talents.”
Levy’s two works of memoir, Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living, have been widely translated across the world. Levy has written for The Royal Shakespeare Company; her dramatizations of two of Freud’s case studies, Dora and The Wolfman, were broadcast by the BBC. Levy was a 2018-19 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Paris, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

For our October Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Farah Jasmine Griffin, the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the inaugural chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department and Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Professor Griffin received her B.A. from Harvard, where she majored in American History and Literature and her PhD in American Studies from Yale. Her major fields of interest are American and African American literature, music, and history.

She has published widely on issues of race and gender, feminism, jazz and cultural politics. Griffin is the author of Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford Connecticut, 1854-1868 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001) and co-author, with Salim Washington, of Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, 2008). Her most recent book is Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (Basic Books, 2013).
Professor Griffin collaborated with composer and pianist Geri Allen and director and actor S. Epatha Merkerson on two theatrical projects, for which she wrote the book: The first “Geri Allen and Friends Celebrate the Great Jazz Women of the Apollo” with Lizz Wright, Dianne Reeves, Teri Lyne Carrington and others, premiered on the main stage of the Apollo Theater in May 2013. “A Conversation with Mary Lou,” featuring vocalist Carmen Lundy, premiered at Harlem Stage in March 2014 and was performed at The John F. Kennedy Center in May 2016.

Her essays and articles have appeared in Essence, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, Art Forum and other publications. She is also a frequent radio commentator on political and cultural issues.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. These events are free and open to the public.

For our September Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Eve Ensler, the Tony Award winning playwright, activist, and author of the Obie Award winning theatrical phenomenon The Vagina Monologues, published in over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries and recently heralded by The New York Times as one of the most important plays of the past 25 years, among numerous other honors. Ensler will speak about her new book The Apology, a powerful memoir where she revisits her childhood in an imagined letter from her abusive father. In a recent review, The Guardian's Arifa Akbar called The Apology a "profound, imaginative and devastating book."

Moderating the event will be Suzanne B. Goldberg, Columbia University Executive Vice President for University Life and Director, Center for Gender & Sexuality Law & Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic. In addition, a representative from the Sexual Violence Response & Rape Crisis/Anti-Violence Support Center, Columbia Health, will be at the talk to answer questions and provide information.

Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the 20-year-old global activist movement, which has raised over 100 million dollars to end violence to and against all women and girls (cisgender, transgender and gender non-conforming). She is also the founder of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries. She is a co-founder of the City of Joy, a revolutionary center for women survivors of violence in Bukavu, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), along with Christine Schuler Deschryver and Dr. Denis Mukwege, and appeared – along with Ms. Deschryver and Dr. Mukwege – in the award-winning documentary film City of Joy released globally as a Netflix Original in 190 countries.

Her writings regularly appear in The Guardian and TIME Magazine. She was named one of Newsweek’s “150 Women Who Changed the World” and The Guardian’s “100 Most Influential Women.” Ensler is the 2018 recipient of the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lily Award. A survivor of violence, this author and activist has dedicated her life to ending violence against women and girls.

For our May Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Ph.D., who is the Chief of the Division of Ethics and faculty in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University. Dr. Lee is a medical anthropologist with extensive experience leading empirical bioethics research that focuses on the sociocultural and ethical dimensions of emerging genomic technologies. Dr. Lee will speak about "Metaphors, Diversity and Trust in Communicating Precision Medicine." Before coming to Columbia, Dr. Lee taught for nearly two decades at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University. She leads studies on the governance and use of biospecimens and patient data in research and the ethics of inclusion and categorizing diversity in human genetic variation research and translational genomics. Her projects include The Ethics of Inclusion: Diversity in Precision Medicine Research; Beyond Consent: Patient Preferences for Governance of Use of Clinical Samples and Data; and Social Networking and Personal Genomics: Implications for Health Research.
Dr. Lee is a Hastings Center Fellow and has served as Chairperson of the Institutional Review Board at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California and on the NIH/NHGRI Coriell Consultation and Oversight Committee of the International Haplotype Map. She currently serves on both the Scientific Advisory and Bioethics Boards of the Kaiser Permanente National Research Biobank, the NIH/NHGRI Genomics and Society Working Group and on the editorial board of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. Dr. Lee received her undergraduate degree in Human Biology from Stanford University and her doctorate from the Joint Program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco. Her postdoctoral fellowship training in Bioethics and Genetics was in the School of Medicine at Stanford University.
Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Medical Center. These events are free and open to the public.

For our April Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Rashad Robinson, President of Color Of Change, a leading online racial justice organization. Driven by more than 1.4 million members working to build political and cultural power for Black communities, Color Of Change is creating a more human and less hostile world for all people in America. Color Of Change uses an innovative combination of technology, research, media savvy and local community engagement to build powerful movements and change the industries that affect Black people’s lives: in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington, prosecutor offices, capitol hills and city halls around the country.
Rashad has led the organization in developing cutting-edge strategies to accelerate reform in the criminal justice system and win justice for its victims, increase electoral participation, cut off corporate support for right-wing organizations, and change the representation of Black people and social issues in news and entertainment media.
Notable victories include redefining the role of local prosecutors, moving over a dozen prosecutors and candidates to reduce mass incarceration and police violence through changes in practice and policy such as ending money bail; forcing over 100 corporations to pull out of the secretive right-wing policy shop, ALEC, following the murder of Trayvon Martin; successfully pressuring corporate leaders to abandon the Trump Business Council and stop enabling the growth of white nationalist groups through their services; framing and winning the federal protection of net neutrality as a key civil rights issue; changing hiring practices in Hollywood, as well as the representation of both race and the criminal justice system; working with Airbnb, Google and Facebook to identify and implement policies for diversity in hiring, eliminate racist and inaccurate content from their platforms and prevent predatory advertising; and forcing Pat Buchanan and Bill O’Reilly off the air.
Under Rashad’s leadership, Color Of Change has grown by a million members and dozens of staff, expanded to four offices across the country and has exponentially increased pathways for people to pursue racial justice, including cultural influencers and industry insiders.
Successful Color Of Change strategies have been profiled in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Fast Company, Wired and The Hollywood Reporter, and on CNN, NPR, PBS, BET and MSNBC. Rashad has appeared in hundreds of articles and op-eds in major national and local news sources, and is a regular keynote speaker at events across the country.
In 2015, Fast Company named Color Of Change the 6th Most Innovative Company in the world, and named Color Of Change the 2nd Most Innovative Company in the nonprofit sector in 2018. In 2016, the Stanford Social Innovation Review profiled Color Of Change for its integrated online/offline strategies, “pursuing the fight for racial justice at Internet speed.”
Previously, Rashad served as Senior Director of Media Programs at GLAAD, leading all of the organization’s advocacy, strategic research, messaging and large-scale media campaigns. These winning culture change and narrative change initiatives helped transform the media landscape, successfully paving the way for broad acceptance and justice for LGBTQ people.
Rashad has been recognized as someone to watch by the Ebony Power 100, The Root 100 and Crain’s New York Business 40 under 40. He is the proud recipient of awards from organizations as varied as ADCOLOR, the United Church of Christ and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Foundation. Rashad serves on the boards of Demos and the Hazen Foundation.
Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Medical Center. These events are free and open to the public.