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 project titled, “Salud, to your Health! Resources for Teaching Health Narratives in English and Spanish.” 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.

Among the first entries in the new repository will be materials from Professor Goldsmith’s own RHMS course on health narratives as well as a 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 non-profit organization that brings together health care professionals, patients, caregivers, artists, and scholars to support and promote narrative medicine practices.