Spirituality, Care, and Culture Lab
The HRC Spirituality, Care, and Culture Lab is committed to understanding the current healthcare and wellness landscape within a broader context that attends to historical understandings of physical and spiritual health and disability, the history of emotions and therapeutics, rejected knowledges and conspiracy thinking, among other areas of inquiry. This research, we believe, is crucial to enriching the human condition and addressing social challenges related to health and wellness. Aiming to support a reverence for the human body among care workers and patients alike, we share a conviction that the methods and approaches practiced in the humanities offer important skills for those engaged in care work, broadly defined to encompass medical care, pastoral care, counseling, social work, and self help in professional and personal spaces and institutions. We support research projects for VCU faculty as well as graduate and undergraduate students; offer supplementary lectures and public programming for courses; and connect faculty, staff, and students from the university and broader Richmond community to address burn-out and promote a sense of meaning and purpose among care-workers.
Meet the Team
Andrew Crislip, PhD
Co-Director
Andrew Crislip is Blake Chair in the History of Christianity, Professor, and Chair of the Department of History at VCU. Some of his publications include Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great: Community, Theology, and Social Conflict in Late Antique Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2015, with David Brakke), Thorns in the Flesh: Illness and Sanctity in Late Ancient Christianity (UPenn, 2013), and From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity (UMich, 2005), along with over two dozen articles and essays focusing on religion and healing, emotions, pain, and spirituality. He has published widely in the history of emotions, explored in two forthcoming books: Ascetic Passions: Emotions in Early Christian Egypt (Brill, 2024); and Emotion in Early Christianity (Eerdmans, 2025). His current work focuses on emotions in late antique religions and the history of asceticism and spirituality.
Contact: acrislip@vcu.edu
Adin Lears, PhD
Co-Director
Adin E. Lears is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at VCU. She is the author of World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late-Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2020) and her articles and essays on issues related to medieval embodiment and poetics have appeared or are forthcoming in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, b2o, and The Hedgehog Review, among other journals. Lears’s current book project offers a premodern history of vitalist thinking in the post-plague England of the fourteenth century. It reveals how the complexities with which early thinkers understood the entwined animality and vegetality of human life might lead to richer, better understandings of vulnerability, need, and care in individualist, market-driven
health environments today. She teaches courses on medieval literature as well as contemporary literature and literary theory at VCU.
Contact: alears@vcu.edu
Mimi Winick, PhD
Co-Director
Mimi Winick is the Powell-Edwards Chair in Religion and the Arts at VCU. She received her PhD in English literature from Rutgers University, and has been a research associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School and an inaugural fellow on the Transcendence and Transformation initiative at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. Her book project, “Ecstatic Inquiry: Comparative Religion and the Secret History of Feminist Spirituality” explores the first generation of feminist theorists of religion in Britain, and the afterlives of their work in literature, politics, and new religious movements.
Contact: mpwinick@vcu.edu
Upcoming Meetings
Please check back soon for our Fall 2025 meetings.