Colby faculty in the Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab
Principal Investigator of the PHIL, Tanya Sheehan is Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jetté Professor of Art; Chair of the Humanities Division; and Chair of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society. Across her career, she has worked at the intersection of American art history and medical humanities. This work includes her first book, Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011); a book in progress on medicine, public health, and modernist art by African Americans; and a book co-edited with Suzanne Hudson titled Modernism, Art, Therapy (2024). She also authored Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018), edited Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death (2022), and edited four books on photography and its histories.
Co-Associate Principal Investigator of the PHIL, Nadia El-Shaarawi is Associate Professor of Global Studies. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist whose research focuses on displacement, humanitarianism, and health, especially in the Middle East and North Africa and Europe. In her courses on global health, students learn about racialized health disparities, how racism structures representations of epidemics and pandemics, racial disparities in health care access on a local and global scale, legacies of colonization on global health, and the consequences of racist medical experimentation and health policy.
Co-Associate Principal Investigator of the PHIL, Jay Sibara is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His work brings together the fields of American literature, critical race and critical disability studies, and the environmental humanities. His forthcoming book examines representations of illness, disability, and medicine in African American and Asian American literatures from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, demonstrating how these works challenge then-dominant public health and scientific racist theories.
Dean Allbritton is Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities. He is writing a cultural history of the early years of HIV/AIDS in Spain through visual culture and ephemera of the time. Broadly, he is interested in representations and experiences of illness and health in contemporary Spanish culture as political metaphors of national wellbeing. He explores how these are not localized issues or concepts but transnational frames of understanding health and sickness.
Inga Kim Diederich is Assistant Professor of History. She works in the areas of Korean studies, history of medicine, and race and nationalism studies. Her current scholarship focuses on the historical development of modern Korean ethnonationalism and its medico-scientific dimensions. On the subject of medicine and race, she has researched the role of blood in the formation of bionational identity in Cold War South Korea, and has taught courses on medicine and the racialized management of Asian bodies in and beyond East Asia.
Sarah Emily Duff is Assistant Professor of African and World History. Her research focuses on the intersections of age, race, and gender in the British Empire and modern South Africa and Africa. Her first monograph, Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony (2015), considers the co-construction of categories of race and childhood in the nineteenth century. Her current research on sex education in twentieth-century South Africa argues that the control of youth sexuality was at the core of a range of projects to imagine South African futures. With support from a Mellon Foundation New Directions Grant, she is also developing a book that explores menopause in the context of British imperialism.
Flavien Falantin is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies. His current book project investigates the dangerous impact of novels, as well as diseases that affect the reader, such as Bovarysm, mimetic desire, and Fanonian lactification. The concept of “narrative contamination” allows him to shed new light on the ways in which novelistic writings negotiate their meaning and social function in active dialogue with medicine, critical race studies, and intersectional and intermedial studies.
Britt Halvorson is Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research explores the transnational aid partnerships that have arisen in Christian communities over the past forty years to address medical resource inequalities. Her first book, Conversionary Sites: Transforming Medical Aid and Global Christianity from Madagascar to Minnesota (2018), examines Christian medical aid programs as contested spaces in which geographically dispersed Christian communities, particularly in southern Africa (Madagascar) and the US, negotiate inequalities based in their histories of colonial interaction. Her work has addressed how Christian humanitarian care ambivalently draws on and racializes economic inequalities linked to embodied medical risk, accountability, and biomedical treatment.
Thom Klepach is Lecturer of Science, Technology, and Society. His current work with students addresses aspects of anatomy, physiology, and medicine, including the history of anatomical representation and contemporary 3D imaging and modeling of the human body. Trained as a biologist, he is also working to understand the current outbreak of Brown Tail Moth in Central Maine.
Kassandra Miller is Assistant Professor of Classics. Her research focuses on the medical theories and practices of ancient Greece and Rome. She is particularly interested in trying to reconstruct the experiences of marginalized healers and patients, and in exploring how ancient medical ideas have influenced modern theories and rhetoric surrounding race and medicine.
Melissa Miller is Assistant Professor of Russian Studies. She specializes in the medical humanities and Russophone literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, with a special focus on depictions of women’s health. She is co-editor of The Russian Medical Humanities: Past and Present (2021), which brings together Russian and American scholars and health practitioners to explore questions surrounding health and healthcare, illness, and recovery in the Russian literary and cultural tradition. Her current book project examines narrative medicine and women’s health in the literature and culture of the multiethnic Russian Empire.
Tiffany Creegan Miller is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies and, beginning in fall 2023, director of the Oak Institute for Human Rights. As a speaker of Kaqchikel (one of 22 Maya languages still spoken in Guatemala), she has been a volunteer interpreter/translator since 2009 for Wuqu’ Kawoq: Maya Health Alliance, a Guatemala-based NGO that provides health care to underserved Maya communities. She is collaborating with Wuqu’ Kawoq on an online medical dictionary with Kaqchikel-Spanish-English terms. Given her experiences with global health in Indigenous Guatemala, she is a regular contributor for Synapsis, an online medical humanities journal organized by Columbia University. Before coming to Colby, she taught medical Spanish at Clemson University and the University of Kansas.
Farah Qureshi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her research explores the impact and application of algorithmic automated decision making towards obstructing equitable access to money management systems, especially in Kenya. She considers how AI systems directly affect quality of life, and the ways that public support systems are impeded rather than supported by applications of machine learning. While she has a particular focus on financial technologies, research continues to reveal how AI processes restrict healthcare services, also consistently failing to reach those who need it the most.
Winifred Tate is Associate Professor of Anthropology. She is currently conducting research on the chemical biographies of women who use drugs, and is interested in the relationship between drug policy formation in Maine and whiteness. Her work as a political anthropologist has examined struggles for democracy and political change in the wake of the more than a century of prohibitionist drug policy regimes in the Americas. She is the author of two books about political violence, drug policy and social movements: Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia (2019) and Drugs, Thugs and Diplomats: US Policymaking in Colombia (2015). Since 2019, she has been conducting research in Maine as part of her work with the Maine Drug Policy Lab at Colby College.