Health Humanities - Minor

The cross-disciplinary field of Health Humanities is growing in popularity at the baccalaureate level as more and more students realize the importance of having a critically-engaged, humanities-led approach to understanding health and illness. This minor fills the growing need by offering students a strong grounding in the humanistic study of health issues. Required courses develop skills of cross-disciplinary health studies in English, with students completing nine hours in courses such as narrative medicine and graphic medicine, literature and medicine, and health rhetoric. Students take an additional nine hours of electives, including courses that engage the ethics and philosophy of care, gender and race-based disparities in health, cross-cultural health communication, as well as social science and science electives. Students finish the minor with a required senior capstone course, which requires them to develop a unique Health Humanities research project related to their ongoing professional and educational goals. This minor is conceptualized with a critical framework: the coursework encourages students not only to take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding current and historical issues related to health, but also to critically reflect upon the methods of study they employ, and the future of Health Humanities as a field.