Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Keynote Speakers

Day One Panelists

Workshop Leaders

Keynote Speakers

Richard Klein

Professor of French Literature and Romance Studies
Cornell University

Richard Klein, Professor of French Literature, is the author of Cigarettes are Sublime (Duke), a cultural history of cigarettes, which has been translated into 14 languages. This book, like his more recent Eat Fat (Pantheon), is designed to bring the insights of critical theory to bear on contemporary social issues. He has recently published Jewelry Talks: a novel thesis (Pantheon), a fictional memoir and a theory of personal ornamentation, which takes many of its categories from the use of jewelry as a figure in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French poetry.

Professor Klein teaches poetry, modernism, and contemporary French thought. For many years he has been an Editor of Diacritics, a journal of literary theory produced by the Department of Romance Studies. His most recent graduate seminar was devoted to Oulipo, the post-War group of authors in Paris whose formalist experiments in literary expression have grown increasingly influential.

Professor Klein has an ongoing interest in the work of Jacques Derrida. He has recently focused his attention on troubadour poetry, written in Old Occitan, with its legacy of courtly love. His interests extend to the social and ideological conflicts out of which that poetry arose and declined in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

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Joycelyn Elders

Professor Emeritus of Pediatric Endocrinology
University of Arkansas College of Medicine
Former United States Surgeon General

Joycelyn Elders received her BA in biology from Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas. After working as a nurse’s aid in a Veterans Administration hospital in Milwaukee for a period, she joined the Army in May, 1953. During her three years in the Army, she was trained as a physical therapist. She then attended the University of Arkansas Medical School, where she obtained her MD degree in 1960. After completing an internship at the University of Minnesota Hospital and a residency in pediatrics at the University of Arkansas Medical Center, Elders earned an M.S. in Biochemistry in 1967.

Elders then received a National Institutes of Health career development award, also serving as assistant professor in pediatrics at the University of Arkansas Medical Center from 1967. She was promoted to associate professor in 1971 and professor in 1976. Her research interests focused on endocrinology, and she received certification as a pediatric endocrinologist in 1978. She became an expert on childhood sexual development.

In 1987, Elders was appointed Director of the Arkansas Department of Health by then-Governor Bill Clinton. Her accomplishments in this position included a ten-fold increase in the number of early childhood screenings annually and almost a doubling of the immunization rate for two-year-olds in Arkansas. In 1992, she was elected President of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers.

Elders became Surgeon General of the Public Health Service on September 8, 1993, appointed by President Clinton. She was the first African American to serve in the position. As Surgeon General, Elders argued the case for universal health coverage, and was a spokesperson for President Clinton’s health care reform effort. She was a strong advocate for comprehensive health education, including sex education, in schools. She was outspoken in her views, and was forced to resign after only 15 months in the position as a result of a controversial remark about sex education. Her last day in office was December 31, 1994. She returned to the University of Arkansas Medical Center as professor of pediatrics.

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Susan M. Love

Clinical Professor of Surgery
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
President and Medical Director, Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation

Susan M. Love is currently President and Medical Director of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation in Pacific Palisades, CA, a nonprofit dedicated to the prevention of breast cancer. She is a Clinical Professor of Surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and founder and senior partner in LLuminari, a multimedia women’s health company. She is one of the “founding mothers” of the breast cancer advocacy movement and continues this work by serving on the boards of the National Breast Cancer Coalition and Y-ME National Breast Cancer Organization. Love was appointed by President Clinton to the National Cancer Advisory Board in 1998.

She is the author of Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, now in its fourth edition, and Dr. Susan Love’s Menopause and Hormone Book (second edition January 2003).

She founded ProDuct Health Inc. (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Cytyc Health Inc), and is on the board of Sanarus Medical Inc (private company). In addition, she provides consultation to Cytyc Health Inc, PacifiCare and Sensei Health. Dr. Love’s primary interests focus on the normal breast anatomy and breast duct fluid as well as hormones and breast cancer.

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Day One Panelists

Dorothy Roberts

Kirkland and Ellis Professor
Northwestern University Law School

Dorothy Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction and motherhood. She is the author of the recently published Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002) and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997), which received the 1998 Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

Roberts is also the co-author of casebooks on constitutional law and women and the law. Roberts has published fifty articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, and Social Text. Her widely cited article, “Punishing drug addicts who have babies: Women of color, equality, and the right of privacy” (Harvard Law Review, 1991) is included in a number of anthologies.

Prior to joining the Northwestern faculty, Roberts was a professor of law at Rutgers University, a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University, and a fellow at Harvard University’s Program in Ethics and the Professions. She serves as a consultant to the Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington, DC and the Open Society Institute’s Program on Reproductive Health and Rights, and as a member of the board of directors of the Public Interest Law Center of New Jersey, the National Black Women’s Health Project, and the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

In 2002–2003, Roberts was a Fulbright scholar at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Trinidad-Tobago, where she conducted research on family planning policy and on gender, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean.

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Susan Kippax

Director, National Centre in HIV Social Research
University of New South Wales, Sydney

Professor Kippax has a PhD in social psychology and is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She has over twenty years of research experience in social aspects of HIV/AIDS and has an extensive research track record in the areas of sexuality and illicit drug use. She is a founding editor of Culture, Health and Sexuality—an International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care. She currently serves on the Advisory Boards of a number of journals including AIDS and Sexualities.

Kippax’ research investigates the interface between social aspects of disease and clinical and biomedical practice. The major focus of her work is on the sexual practice of gay men and the ways in which they have collectively modified their practice in order to protect themselves. Of particular interest is the manner in which gay men have appropriated medical technologies to help them fashion safe sex strategies—and, at the same time, resisted the moralizing implicit in much medical advice.

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Kathleen LeBesco

Associate Professor & Chair of Communication Arts Department
Marymount Manhattan College

Kathleen LeBesco is author of Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity and coeditor of The Drag King Anthology, Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, and the “Excess” special issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.

LeBesco is Book Review Editor for the journal Disability Studies Quarterly and Vice Chair of the Disability Issues Caucus of the National Communication Association. She teaches in the areas of communication theory and media and gender studies.

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Carl Elliott

Professor, Center for Bioethics; Department of Pediatrics
University of Minnesota Medical School;
Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota

A native of Clover, South Carolina, Carl Elliott was educated at Davidson College and at Glasgow University in Scotland, where he received his PhD in philosophy. He received his MD from the Medical University of South Carolina.

Elliott came to Minnesota in 1997 after serving on the faculty of McGill University in Montreal. Prior to his appointment at McGill he held postdoctoral and visiting appointments at the University of Chicago Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, the Department of Medical Humanities at East Carolina University, the Bioethics Center at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and the University of Natal Medical School (now the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine), the first medical school in South Africa for non-white students. In 2000, he returned to the University of Otago as Williams Evans Visiting Fellow.

Elliott has written on the ethics of enhancement technologies, the philosophy of psychiatry, the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the novels of Walker Percy. His current research is supported by a publication grant from the National Library of Medicine. He was also a Principal Investigator for an NIH grant titled “Ethnicity, Citizenship, Family: Identity after the Human Genome Project,” and a SSHRC grant titled “Enhancement Technologies and Human Identity.” In 2003–04 he was Visiting Associate Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he led a seminar on the social implications of bioethics.

His books include Prozac as a Way of Life, Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, and A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics, Culture, and Identity.

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Workshop Leaders

Kane Race

Lecturer, Postgraduate Research Coordinator
National Centre in HIV Social Research
University of New South Wales, Australia
email: k.race@unsw.edu.au

Dr. Race’s work concerns the politics of care as elaborated in the fields of HIV/AIDS, queer theory, the politics of illicit drugs, concepts and practices of harm reduction, contemporary pharmaceutical production, and consumerized medicine. His book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, forthcoming from Duke University Press, contends with the increasing significance of drug discourses (both licit and illicit) in contemporary body politics and the transforming relations among gay men, HIV/AIDS, and the medical establishment.

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Roddey Reid

Professor of French Studies and Cultural Studies
University of California, San Diego
email: rreid@ucsd.edu

An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of French studies, science studies, communication, history, and cultural studies, Roddey Reid is Professor of French Studies and Cultural Studies and is affiliated faculty of the Science Studies Program and the Critical Gender Studies Program at UC San Diego.

His teaching and scholarship focus on the history of modern cultures and societies from the perspective of the changing ways in which citizenship, selfhood, and the life of the body (family, health, sexuality) are shaped by particular cultural forms (literature, media, advertising, fashion), governmental policies, medical and scientific knowledge, and social movements. A former Japan Foundation Abe Fellow (awarded by the Social Science Research Council), he is author of Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750-1910 (Stanford University Press, 1993), co-editor (with Sharon Traweek) of Doing Science + Culture: How Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies Are Changing the Way We Look at Science and Medicine (Routledge, 2000), and author of Globalizing Tobacco Control: Anti-Smoking Campaigns in California, France, and Japan (Indiana University Press, 2005).

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Rebecca Herzig

Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Bates College
email: rherzig@bates.edu

Rebecca Herzig is the author of Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America (Rutgers University Press, 2005), and, with Evelynn Hammonds, The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics. She teaches courses in the history, sociology, and anthropology of medicine at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

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Sarah Jain

Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Stanford University
email: sarjain@stanford.edu

Sarah Jain teaches cultural anthropology at Stanford University. Her main interest is in the ways that suffering is legitimated and distributed. She is the author of Injury (Princeton University Press, 2006), and Commodity Violence: American Automobility (Duke University Press, forthcoming).

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Bradley Lewis

Assistant Professor
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University
email: bl466@nyu.edu

Bradley Lewis, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, with affiliated appointments in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of Psychiatry. He has dual training in humanities and psychiatry, and writes and teaches at the interface of medicine, humanities, and cultural studies.

Lewis is an associate editor for the Journal of Medical Humanities and is the author of Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and The New Psychiatry: Birth of Postpsychiatry.

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Petra Kuppers

Associate Professor of English, Theatre, and Women’s Studies
University of Michigan

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community artist, and author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minnesota, 2007), and Community Performance: An Introduction (Routledge, 2007).

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Nicholas B. King

Assistant Professor, Departments of Bioethics and History
Case Western Reserve University

Nicholas B. King is currently an assistant professor of bioethics and history at Case Western Reserve University. He received a master’s degree in medical anthropology and a doctorate in history of science from Harvard University, and was previously a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society scholar at the University of Michigan.

King’s research examines public health ethics, with particular foci on biodefense, health disparities, and the commodification of medicine. He has published essays on these topics in the journals Bioethics, Grey Room, Social Studies of Science, Osiris, and the Journal of the History of Medicine and the Allied Sciences.

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Raymond G. De Vries

Assistant Professor, Bioethics Program and Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Medical Education
Medical School, University of Michigan

He is the author of Pleasing Birth: Midwifery and Maternity Care in the Netherlands (Temple University Press, 2005), and co-editor of The View from Here: Bioethics and the Social Sciences (Blackwell, 2007). His current research is focused on the regulation of science; clinical trials of genetic therapies and deep brain stimulation; international research ethics; and the social, ethical, and policy issues associated with voluntary cesarean section.

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Lisa Kane Low

Certified Nurse Midwife, Assistant Professor, Department of Women's Studies and the School of Nursing
University of Michigan

Lisa is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in Women's Studies and the School of Nursing at the University of Michigan. She also practices as a certified nurse midwife in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan Health System.

The focus of her research is on care practices during labor and the socio-cultural influences on women's and adolescents' experiences of childbirth. Areas of emphasis have included the role of social support and stress on childbirth health outcomes, implications of global Safe Motherhood health policy in low resource settings in Latin America and the policy and research implications of elective cesareans. She teaches interdisciplinary courses on women's health and reproductive health within the women's studies department.

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Elizabeth (Libby) Bogdan-Lovis

Assistant Director, Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences
Michigan State University

As Assistant Director to Michigan State University Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences, Elizabeth (Libby) Bogdan-Lovis engages in bioethics' teaching, research and administration. Her current work focuses on the recent rapid integration of evidence-based medicine into medical education curricula and clinical practice - observing in particular, how such information interfaces with the traditional construction and flow of medical authority.

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Magdalena Harris

PhD, National Centre in HIV Social Research
University of New South Wales, Australia

Magdalena Harris is based at the National Centre in HIV Social Research, University of New South Wales, Australia. Her doctoral research addresses the experiences of individuals living with hepatitis C in New Zealand and Australia with a focus on stigma, disclosure, social support and decisions regarding treatment uptake. Magdalena's background is in sociology, she has had a decade of involvement with communities of people who inject drugs and her research interests include: illness narratives, drug and alcohol use, marginalized communities, hepatitis C, stigma and governmentality.

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