History Faculty Awarded IAS Collaborative for Second Year

Each year, the Institute for Advanced Study at UMN fund research and creative collaboratives put together by faculty. These represent some of the most innovative work at the University. Interdisciplinary groups come together with an idea of working on a project in collaboration with one another. This year, History faculty member, Mary Jo Maynes, along with Leslie Morris in the department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch have had their project renewed for another year.

Maynes, whose work focuses on European history of the family, gender, and narratives of girlhood and Morris, whose work centers around the Holocaust, narrative medicine and literary theory, have worked together several times. Most recently, they co-taught a trans-continental course that took a deeper look into the records of the past while questioning the selection process. Launched in Fall 2017, their collaborative, “Narrative/Medicine: Personal Narrative Analysis across the Liberal Arts and Medical Practice,” centers on interdisciplinary work on personal narrative and brings it to bear specifically on the production and analysis of personal narratives of illness and trauma.

In recent years, cultural critics, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars and medical professionals attended to the relationships between experiences of bodily pain, trauma, and illness and the creation of narratives to describe and grapple with these experiences. Having begun this work previously, Professors Maybes and Morris are expanding their work to engage with narratives that recount the experiences of medical practitioners and educators, in addition to narratives recounting experiences of illness. 

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