Humanities of Health and Well Being
The Humanities of Health and Well Being area of study is both a longstanding and an emerging field at UMass, being addressed across several fronts.
- Animating Family Well-being: In an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between the Art department and the Baystate Medical Center, Jeffery Kasper, assistant professor and undergraduate program director, is leading the project “Animating Family Well-being,” by directing a design team of undergraduate and graduate students to develop an ongoing series of bilingual animated videos.
- Medical Humanities Certificate: HFA is home to a Medical Humanities Certificate, a 15-credit credential rooted in our highly regarded department of Philosophy that is open to any student on campus, seeks to increase student awareness of the “cultural, social, and political dimensions of medical issues, practices, and services.”
- Public History and End of Life Care: Since 2014, students and faculty in the Public History program have pursued work at the intersection of historical perspective and healthy aging, in grant-funded partnership with the Amherst Historical Society and several local assisted living facilities, and now help lead a National Council on Public History working group on Public History and End of Life Care.
- Spanish and Health Certificate: The Spanish and Health certificate equips undergraduate UMass Amherst nursing students with the skills to address the unique health-care needs of Spanish-speaking populations.
Related Certificates
In addition to credentials based in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, UMass Amherst students have access to credentials across the Five Colleges—themselves often led by and involving UMass faculty members.
Related Faculty
Meghan Armstrong
Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics, LLC
Director, Spanish and Health Certificate Program
Armstrong-Abrami’s research focuses on intonation’s role in conveying and perceiving mental states; her most recent funded project included a study on the use of intonation by Hispanic mothers and their children in urban centers in Western Mass. She is also interested in how individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder produce and perceive mental state intonation.
Hallie Bahn
Assistant Professor, Department of Art
An interdisciplinary artist and educator working in non-traditional and expanded animation,Bahn looks to dissolve the traditional boundaries of screen-based digital animation and create interactive, physical relationships between the art and the viewer. In 2023, Bahn was a Public Interest Technology fellow for the project “Another Care is Possible: Art, Ethics, and Health Technologies.”
Caryn Brause
Professor, Department of Architecture
Caryn Brause FAIA is Professor in the Department of Architecture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she teaches design studios and an honors research seminar focused on student health, wellbeing, and campus space. Through her many activities, Brause connects the academy and the architecture profession, and she works to translate research into practice domains. Her current research projects examine the spatial dimensions of relationship-building in the post-pandemic campus with a focus on equity, inclusion, and wellbeing. She is author of The Designer's Field Guide to Collaboration (Routledge, 2017).
Sarah Cornell
Senior Lecturer, History
Cornell’s specialties in histories of slavery and the Civil War Era have long intersected with the history of disability and history of medicine, and she is currently developing intro and upper-level courses in this area. Her professional experiences include sitting on a FDA-NORD advisory committee, briefing the MA public health committee, working with lobbyists, giving invited lectures to scientists, lawyers, marketing, business executives, and other activities that inform her teaching.
Debbie Felton
Professor, Department of Classics
The interdisciplinary nature of Felton’s research and teaching interests had led her to focus on folklore in classical literature, especially anything about the supernatural and monstrous. This includes myths and folktales that may have originated based on observation of various health issues. Her publications include articles on how the ancient Greeks and Romans perceived the ageing disease progeria, what superstitions they had about menstruation, and how their portrayals of witches related to attitudes about fertility and abortion. Felton regularly teaches Classics 250: The Classical Origins of Western Medicine and Medical Terminology. Topics include ancient treatment of wounds, surgery and surgical instruments, and progress in understanding human anatomy and physiology.
Emily T. Hamilton
Assistant Professor, Department of History
In addition to her scholarship on the history of math education, Hamilton’s research and teaching interests include the social history of medicine, with a particular focus on public health, the politics of health and health care, and equity in reproductive and disability medicine. Her courses include the History of Health Care and Medicine in the US (HIST 264; GenEd); History of Western Science and Technology II (HIST181; GenEd); Science, Technology, and War in 20th Century US and Europe (HIST 380); as well as the graduate seminar Historiography of Science, Technology, and Medicine (HIST 693S).
Sophie Horowitz
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy
Director, Medical Humanities Certificate Program
Horowitz works mainly in epistemology. She is currently interested in the relationship between rationality and truth, and in formal questions about how to think about accuracy and partial belief. Her course “Medical Ethics” (Phil 164) offers an “introduction of ethics, and its application to various issues in medicine, health care, and the use of pharmaceuticals. Topics may include: abortion, euthanasia, medical paternalism, medical experimentation, access to drugs, access to medical procedures, and the allocation of medical resources.”
Jeffery Kasper
Undergraduate Program Director, Department of Art
Assistant Professor
Kasper is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator, specializing in public art, visual design, and social engagement. In collaboration with physicians from Baystate Medical Center, Springfield-area parents, and educators, Kasper with students produced an ongoing series of bilingual animated videos promoting healthy child development and family well-being.
Jordan Katz
Assistant Professor, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies
Katz is a historian of early modern Jewry, with a focus on Jewish cultural history, history of medicine, and women and gender in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her current book project examines the role of Jewish midwives within communal, intellectual, and medical frameworks in the early modern Ashkenazic world.
Kirsten Leng
Associate Professor, Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies
A historian of sexuality, feminism, science and humor, Leng’s research runs the gamut from comedy to tragedy. In 2023, Leng was a Public Interest Technology fellow for the project “Another Care is Possible: Art, Ethics, and Health Technologies.” Her newest research project examines the history of stillbirth during the 20th century in the United States.
Lisa Lehmberg
Professor of Music Education, Department of Music and Dance
In 2016, Lehmberg's book Music for Life: Music Participation and Quality of Life of Senior Citizens, co-authored with C. Victor Fung, offered a fresh, new exploration of the impact of musical experiences on the quality of life of senior citizens, and charts a new direction in the facilitation of the musical lives of people of all ages. In 2023, Lehmberg’s newest book, “Music, Senior Centers, and Quality of Life”--a “a groundbreaking look at quality of life via the music participation of older adults in diverse US senior centers”- appeared from Cambridge University Press.
Sandy Litchfield
Associate Professor, Department of Architecture
An artist and curator, Litchfield teaches courses that lie at the intersection of art, architecture, design, and writing. Litchfield is a member of the team developing the HEART (Health, Environment, and the ARTs) Center.
Evan A. MacCarthy
Five College Visiting Associate Professor, Music History, Dept of Music and Dance
MacCarthy’s wide-ranging research interests include the history of fifteenth-century music and music theory, late medieval chant, German music in the Baroque era, and nineteenth-century American music. His course The Concept of Late Style in Music (MUS 690S) explores the concept of “late” creativity “looks closely at the musical and biographical contexts in which late-age music was composed, seeking both to question the assumptions and conflicts surrounding 'late style,' aging, mortality, and cultural gerontology, and to prompt a more critical understanding of the late/last works of composers and musicians.” He is also director of the multi-year, arts and humanities project Elements.
Marla Miller
Associate Dean for Strategic Initiaitves, College of Humanities and Fine Arts
Miller’s interests principally center around public history and healthy aging. Most recently, she served as co-chair of the 2023 National Council on Public History Working Group “Uniting Public History and End of Life Care,” which gathered public historians and healthcare professionals and researchers in a year-long exploration of the potential benefits to health and caregiving through end-of/life oral history work. She is also a member of the team developing the HEART (Health, Environment, and the ARTs) Center.
Zinhle Mncube
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy
Zinhle’s current research concerns the epistemology and ethics of personalizing medicine, as well as the use of race in medicine, broadly construed. She is one of the editors of the recently published Routledge volume, Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science. Zinhle has published papers on the use of race in medical algorithms, the biological basis of race, and a causal construal of heritability estimates, amongst others.
Jennifer Nye
Senior Lecturer II in History, Law and Social Justice, Department of History
Chair of the Five College Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice Certificate
Professor Nye has over twelve years of experience as a practicing public interest attorney focusing on health and mental health care law and litigated cases at the administrative, state, and federal court levels. Most recently, she worked for the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a national public interest law firm. Her courses at UMass Amherst include the “History of Reproductive Rights Law” (Hist 378R) and “Sex & the Supreme Court” (Hist 378)
Amanda C. Seaman
Program Director, Japanese Language & Literature Program
Director, Five College Certificate in Culture, Health and Science
The author of Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2017), Professor Seaman is a member of the Five College Steering Committee on Culture, Health and Science and directs their undergraduate certificate program. Her course “Japan through its Afflictions (Japan 353) “explores how illness, medicine, and healing have been understood and represented in Japan over the past millennium, offering valuable perspectives on the meaning and treatment of illness in other ‘modern’ and ‘modernizin’" societies. Topics considered include the impact of Chinese medicine and medical learning in early Japan, the development of indigenous medicine, the transformation of Japanese notions of illness and wellness through contact and exchange with foreign (and particularly Western) societies, and contemporary challenges facing the Japanese healthcare system.
Angela Willey
Associate Professor, Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies
Utilizing her expertise in queer feminist theory, settler colonial and postcolonial studies, and the history of gender, sexuality, and race in the biosciences, Willey’s research addresses the naturalization of forms of social belonging that undergird the privatization of wealth and care and on the conditions of possibility for the emergence and sustainability of other ways of knowing and forms of relationality.
Matt Wormer
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Wormer’s research and teaching examines the production and sale of opium in British India to offer a new explanation for the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839. At once a powerful medical analgesic, an addictive recreational narcotic, and an immensely profitable article of trade, opium raised fundamental questions about the relationship between use value and exchange value at the heart of capitalist exchange.
Barbara Zecchi
Professor of Film Studies
Among Professor Zecchi’s broad-ranging interests are representations of aging in film. With Raquel Medina, she co-organized the first International Conference CinemAGEnder in Birmingham, UK (2016), and the International Workshop Aging Studies and Visual Culture at the University Complutense of Madrid (2017). Zecchi is the co-founder and vice-president of the international research network CinemAGEnder.