This Department of English is hosting this panel on medical humanities and career paths for English B.A.s. We are delighted to welcome back two English B.A. alumni who went on to become medical doctors: Dr. John Vaughn (Director of Student Health Services and Associate Professor of Community & Family Medicine at Duke University) and Dr. Vidhya Prakash (Professor of Clinical Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Southern Illinois (SIU) School of Medicine). They will discuss their career paths, including how the English degree prepared them for and influenced their careers in medicine. Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English and Director of Medical Humanities, James Phelan, will join our panelists to discuss the interdisciplinary aims and outcomes of medical humanities work.
Please register for the webinar in advance at this site (you will be emailed the Zoom link automatically).
We encourage you to submit questions for the panelists ahead of time when you register. If you have questions about this event, please contact Katie Stanutz (stanutz.3@osu.edu).
About the Panelists:
John Vaughn, MD is Director of Student Health Services, and Associate Professor of Community & Family Medicine at Duke University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts (English) and Doctor of Medicine degrees from The Ohio State University. He has worked in college health for over 13 years at The Ohio State University and Duke University where he has developed Narrative Medicine curricula at both the graduate medical and undergraduate levels. His main academic interest lies in the field of Narrative Medicine, specifically how the development of narrative competence informs and enhances medical education and provider-patient communication. His writing on the doctor-patient relationship has appeared in national publications and been anthologized in a college-level Composition and Rhetoric textbook. He is the co-editor of the textbook Principles and Practice of College Health, and with Professor James Phelan, is co-authoring a new textbook, Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx.
Dr. Vidhya Prakash is a Professor of Clinical Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases faculty member at Southern Illinois (SIU) School of Medicine. Dr. Prakash graduated from The Ohio State University with a BA in English. She received her MD degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. She completed her Internal Medicine residency followed by Infectious Diseases fellowship at the San Antonio Uniformed Services Health Education Consortium. After serving as an Infectious Diseases physician in the United States Air Force for ten years on active duty status, she retired from the military in 2014 and joined SIU School of Medicine. Dr. Prakash serves as Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs and Chair of the Clinical Competency Committee in the Department of Internal Medicine. She is founder and director of SIU Medicine’s Alliance for Women in Medicine and Science (AWIMS). Dr. Prakash serves as Chair of the Health and Healthcare Committee, Illinois Council on Women and Girls and as Chair of the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) Diversity in Health Care Task Force. She is Chair of the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA) Rural Health Committee, Section of Diversity and Inclusion and is also Director of AMWA Membership. She lives in Springfield, Illinois with her husband, Dr. Eric Black, and their children, Eric Shiva and Ethan Prakash.
James Phelan is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English, the Director of Medical Humanities, and the Director of Project Narrative. He teaches and writes about the English and American novel, especially from modernism to the present, nonfiction narrative and narrative theory. He is the first person in the history of the English Department to be awarded both the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award (2007) and the Distinguished Scholar Award (2004). He is the author of five books that develop the contours of a rhetorical theory of narrative. The most recent are Living to Tell about It (2005) and Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2007). He edits Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and, with Peter J. Rabinowitz and Robyn Warhol, co-edits the Ohio State University Press book series The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Phelan has also edited or co-edited numerous volumes, the most recent of which are Teaching Narrative Theory (with David Herman and Brian McHale), After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative (with Jakob Lothe and Susan R. Suleiman) and Fact, Fiction, and Form: Selected Essays of Ralph W. Rader (with David H. Richter).
