NEH grant to support Salud, to your Health!
Daena Goldsmith, Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies, and Kristine Muñoz, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, received a $149,999 NEH Humanities Initiatives grant for their collaborative project titled, “Salud, to your Health! Resources for Teaching Health Narratives in English and Spanish.” Hosted by the University of Iowa, the three-year project will create a digital database of course materials and other resources for developing and teaching courses in narrative medicine and health humanities in English and in Spanish. The repository will include materials for undergraduate courses as well as workshops for health professionals and community groups that encourage the use of oral and written narratives as ways to understand and deal with health, illness, grief, and caregiving. The grant also supports developing a journal for undergraduate students to publish health narratives written in Spanish.
Goldsmith and Muñoz have known one another since graduate school and this project grew out of their ongoing conversations about courses they teach on health narratives. Comparing notes about syllabi, assignments, readings, and community-based projects sparked the idea to create a website where that sort of sharing could happen on a larger scale. Among the first entries in the new repository will be materials from Goldsmith’s RHMS Health Narratives course (RHMS 320) and the Narrative Medicine Practicum she teaches through LC’s Center for Community and Global Health. That practicum is a joint undertaking between the Center and the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that brings together health care professionals, patients, caregivers, artists, and scholars to support and promote narrative medicine practices.
Information about this award is included in NEH’s January 11, 2022 press release. Since then, the team has been interviewed by both the Daily Iowan and by Iowa Public Radio.
February 2022
