Faculty Awarded Mellon Wide Angle Learning Grant Stipends
Five St. Lawrence University faculty have been awarded stipends from the Mellon Wide Angle Learning Grant project. These stipends will support the development of new health humanities courses for the university’s minor in Public Health.
Eloise Brezault, assistant professor of Francophone and African studies, is developing Zombies, Epidemics and Illnesses in the Francophone World, which will look at the socio-cultural significance of illnesses represented in French fiction, graphic narrative, and film. Brezault plans to offer her course in the fall of 2019.
Allie Rowland, Maurer assistant professor of performance and communication arts, will be developing Against Health: Rhetoric & the Health Humanities, a course that looks at concepts of health as rhetoric, shaped as much by discourse as by medical investigation. Rowland will be offering Against Health in the spring of 2019.
Jessica Sierk, assistant professor of education, will look specifically at sex education through a variety of disciplinary lenses to assess how it implicates—and excludes— broader conversations on gender, disability, and the LGBTQ community. Her course, Sexuality Education, will be offered in the spring of 2019.
Jennifer Thomas, associate professor of performance and communication arts, will be developing Taboo Performances: Body Politics. Students in this spring 2019 course will scrutinize the taboos that shape body image using drama, as well as literary and performance theory.
Rosa Williams, assistant professor of history and African studies, will be developing Health and Healing in Africa, a course to be offered in the fall of 2019 that will use history, film, and memoir to explore African perspectives on health from colonial times to the present.
Awarded to St. Lawrence in 2017 by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mellon Wide Angle Grant project funds interdisciplinary courses and extracurricular activities that engage with issues of public health through humanities and the arts.
