Division of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University

?? NOAHCON 25 is coming! ?? Join us November 5-7 at the NYU Kimmel Center in New York City, and virtually on November 19! ??? We’re proud to partner with the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, NYU Steinhardt, and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab to bring you NOAH's 9th annual conference at the intersection of arts and health. ???? ?? The Call for Proposals is LIVE! Submit now and be part of the conversation: https://lnkd.in/gZQ5bbZc ?? Looking to make an impact? Check out our sponsorship opportunities and support the future of arts in health! ?? Early bird registration is coming soon—stay tuned! ????

JOIN US TOMORROW on Wednesday March 5th at 6pm EST for our hashtag #narrativemedicine rounds. For our March rounds, we are honored to welcome Dinaw Mengestu, award-winning novelist, MacArthur Fellow, and director of the Written Arts Program at Bard, who will be speaking about his recent novel Someone Like Us. In Someone Like Us, Dinaw Mengestu tells the story of Mamush, the son of Ethiopian immigrants who seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home. After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage. With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he’d been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Dinaw Mengestu is the author of four novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: Someone Like Us All (Knopf, 2024), Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. His work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. He holds a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. He is the director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College and the director of the Center for Ethics and Writing.Dinaw Mengestu will be in conversation with Naheed Phiroze Patel.

JOIN US NEXT WEEK on Wednesday March 5th at 6pm EST for our #narrativemedicine rounds. For our March rounds, we are honored to welcome Dinaw Mengestu, award-winning novelist, MacArthur Fellow, and director of the Written Arts Program at Bard, who will be speaking about his recent novel Someone Like Us. In Someone Like Us, Dinaw Mengestu tells the story of Mamush, the son of Ethiopian immigrants who seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home. After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage. With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he’d been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Dinaw Mengestu is the author of four novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: Someone Like Us All (Knopf, 2024), Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. His work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. He holds a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. He is the director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College and the director of the Center for Ethics and Writing.Dinaw Mengestu will be in conversation with Naheed Phiroze Patel.

JOIN US TOMORROW: Wednesday?February 5th at 6pm EST for our #narrativemedicine rounds. For our first rounds of the spring semester, we have the privilege of welcoming Dr. Jennifer Natalya Fink, award-winning author and co-founder of Georgetown's Program in Disability Studies, who will be speaking about her recent book All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship. In All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship, Dr. Jennifer Natalya Fink weaves together stories of members of her own family with sociohistorical research to illustrate how the eradication of disabled people from family narratives is rooted in racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic sorting systems inherited from Nazis. By examining the rhetoric of genetic testing, she shows that a fear of disability begins before a child is even born and that a fear of disability is, fundamentally, a fear of care. Dr. Fink analyzes our racist and sexist care systems, exposing their inequities as a source of stigmatizing ableism. Inspired by queer and critical race theory, Dr. Fink calls for a lineage of disability: a reclamation of disability as a history, a culture, and an identity. Such a lineage offers a means of seeing disability in the context of a collective sense of belonging, as cause for celebration, and is a call for a radical reimagining of carework and kinship. All Our Families challenges us to re-lineate disability within the family as a means of repair toward a more inclusive and flexible structure of care and community. Dr. Jennifer Natalya Fink is a professor of English at Georgetown University. She is also the co-founder, former director, and current core faculty in Georgetown's Program in Disability Studies. Dr. Fink is the author of seven award-winning books, including All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship (Beacon: 2022). She has written about disability lineage and neurodiversity for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Teen Vogue, and many other mainstream press venues. An equally committed teacher and researcher, Dr. Fink received the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence and the President's Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers. A lifelong learner, she recently completed a certificate from the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Fink is a 2024 recipient of the Fulbright Peer Specialist award, and is currently at work on Neuropsyches: Neurodiversity, Narrativity, and the New Psychoanalysis. Dr. Jennifer Natalya Fink will be in conversation with Joseph Eveld, MS, MFA, Program Manager for the Division of Narrative Medicine and lecturer in creative writing and disability and illness narratives for the Narrative Medicine MS and Certificate programs.

JOIN US NEXT WEEK on February 5th at 6pm EST for our #narrativemedicine rounds. For our first rounds of the spring semester, we have the privilege of welcoming Dr. Jennifer Natalya Fink, award-winning author and co-founder of Georgetown's Program in Disability Studies, who will be speaking about her recent book All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship. In All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship, Dr. Jennifer Natalya Fink weaves together stories of members of her own family with sociohistorical research to illustrate how the eradication of disabled people from family narratives is rooted in racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic sorting systems inherited from Nazis. By examining the rhetoric of genetic testing, she shows that a fear of disability begins before a child is even born and that a fear of disability is, fundamentally, a fear of care. Dr. Fink analyzes our racist and sexist care systems, exposing their inequities as a source of stigmatizing ableism. Inspired by queer and critical race theory, Dr. Fink calls for a lineage of disability: a reclamation of disability as a history, a culture, and an identity. Such a lineage offers a means of seeing disability in the context of a collective sense of belonging, as cause for celebration, and is a call for a radical reimagining of carework and kinship. All Our Families challenges us to re-lineate disability within the family as a means of repair toward a more inclusive and flexible structure of care and community. Dr. Jennifer Natalya Fink is a professor of English at Georgetown University. She is also the co-founder, former director, and current core faculty in Georgetown's Program in Disability Studies. Dr. Fink is the author of seven award-winning books, including All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship (Beacon: 2022). She has written about disability lineage and neurodiversity for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Teen Vogue, and many other mainstream press venues. An equally committed teacher and researcher, Dr. Fink received the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence and the President's Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers. A lifelong learner, she recently completed a certificate from the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Fink is a 2024 recipient of the Fulbright Peer Specialist award, and is currently at work on Neuropsyches: Neurodiversity, Narrativity, and the New Psychoanalysis. Dr. Jennifer Natalya Fink will be in conversation with Joseph Eveld, MS, MFA, Program Manager for the Division of Narrative Medicine and lecturer in creative writing and disability and illness narratives for the Narrative Medicine MS and Certificate programs.

JOIN US TONIGHT Wednesday December 4th at 6pm EST for our #narrativemedicine rounds. For our final rounds of the fall term, we are honored to welcome Linda Villarosa, Pulitzer Prize finalist and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, who will be speaking about her recent book Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation. In Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to their white counterparts. Today’s medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading. Linda Villarosa is an award-winning journalist who covers race, inequality and public health at The New York Times Magazine. Her work examines HIV/AIDS, maternal health and maternal mortality, environmental justice, COVID-19 racial health disparities and life expectancy. A former executive editor of Essence Magazine, she is the author of the book Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation. It was honored as one of the top 10 books of 2022 by The New York Times Book Review and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Villarosa’s contribution to The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project highlights race-based physiological myths that have endured in medical practice since slavery, and an expanded version of her essay was included in the book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Linda Villarosa will be in conversation with Dr. Monica Lypson, MD, MHPE, the Vice Dean for Education at Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and serves as the Rolf H. Scholdager Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She previously served as a professor, and Vice-Chair of Medicine, Division Director of General Internal Medicine at The George Washington University School of Medical and Health Sciences. She has been serving the generalist community as President-elect, President and Past President of the Society of General Internal Medicine. In these role, Dr. Lypson provides visionary leadership for a diverse group of faculty and students involved in educational and innovation, medical education research, and, community outreach.

JOIN US NEXT WEEK on Wednesday December 4th at 6pm EST for our #narrativemedicine rounds. For our final rounds of the fall term, we are honored to welcome Linda Villarosa, Pulitzer Prize finalist and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, who will be speaking about her recent book Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation. In Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to their white counterparts. Today’s medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading. Linda Villarosa is an award-winning journalist who covers race, inequality and public health at The New York Times Magazine. Her work examines HIV/AIDS, maternal health and maternal mortality, environmental justice, COVID-19 racial health disparities and life expectancy. A former executive editor of Essence Magazine, she is the author of the book Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation. It was honored as one of the top 10 books of 2022 by The New York Times Book Review and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Villarosa’s contribution to The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project highlights race-based physiological myths that have endured in medical practice since slavery, and an expanded version of her essay was included in the book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Linda Villarosa will be in conversation with Dr. Monica Lypson, MD, MHPE, the Vice Dean for Education at Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and serves as the Rolf H. Scholdager Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She previously served as a professor, and Vice-Chair of Medicine, Division Director of General Internal Medicine at The George Washington University School of Medical and Health Sciences. She has been serving the generalist community as President-elect, President and Past President of the Society of General Internal Medicine. In these role, Dr. Lypson provides visionary leadership for a diverse group of faculty and students involved in educational and innovation, medical education research, and, community outreach.