Crafting a Health Humanities Minor at VCU
In 2023, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the Health Humanities Lab $150,000 in support of a three-year effort to establish a minor in health humanities. The project, “Crafting a Health Humanities Minor,” led by lab director Chris Cynn and Sachi Shimomura, launched in Fall 2024 and focuses on understanding cultural, political, social, and ethical dimensions not just of the practice of medicine, but also of the human body and mind as shaped by health, mortality, experience, and beliefs.
The team is also developing an Introduction to Health Humanities ACCA course, a collaboration between several faculty members and students. This course contains ten units, to help introduce students to our program objectives: students minoring in Health Humanities will benefit from learning:
- Broad historical, multicultural perspectives of how health issues intersect with social dynamics and cultural constructs, and how they have shifted over time and space;
- how conceptions of health are depicted in various media or experienced in everyday lives, both in the US and globally;
- the history of assumptions in contemporary Western medicine;
- mindful resilience, empathy, complex humanistic analysis and synthesis of skills from literary, cultural, artistic, or historical study;
- communications skills, project development and management experience useful for medical school or career paths that value flexible thought, cross-disciplinary work, cultural literacy, critical thinking, and audience-sensitive writing, communication, or performance.
Meet the Team
Sachi Shimomura, PhD
Project Director
Sachi Shimomura is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Aaron Anderson, PhD
Project Co-director
Aaron Anderson, PhD, MFA, is Founding Director of VCU’s Standardized Patient Program. He is also Professor, Associate Chair and Head of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Theatre, Liaison for Arts + Health Research in the School of the Arts, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Internal Medicine. He holds an Interdisciplinary PhD in Culture from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
Scott Breuninger, PhD
Project Co-director
Scott Breuninger joined the Honors College during the summer of 2020. As Dean, Dr. Breuninger serves as the senior academic and administrative leader of the Honors College and is responsible for overseeing the college’s strategic, operational, and financial directions. His research focuses on the social, moral and economic dimensions of the Enlightenment, particularly how this movement was expressed in Ireland. This work has resulted in a book (Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context), and a co-edited collection (The Bonds of Society: Sociability and Cosmopolitanism on the Fringes of the Enlightenment).
Chris Cynn, PhD
Project Co-director
Chris Cynn is an associate professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Her interdisciplinary research draws from gender, queer of color, and cultural studies to explore literary and visual productions related to illness, health, memory, and archives. She has worked as a full-time community organizer and as a video producer, and is the author of Prevention: Gender, Sexuality, HIV, and the Media in Côte d’Ivoire, the co-producer of a documentary on a human rights trial in Haiti, and the co-producer and director of a number of short videos.