American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities Spring Meeting
Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine • Chicago, Illinois
April 23–25, 2009

General Information | Full Schedule | Speaker Bios | Registration | Parking

Keynote Speaker Biographies

Charles Bosk, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure (2nd edition 2003), and What Would You Do? The Collision of Ethics and Ethnography (2008).

Rita Charon, MD, PhD, is Professor of Clinical Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine. Formerly editor-in-chief of the journal Literature and Medicine, Dr. Charon is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2006); co-editor of Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (2002); and co-editor of Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (2008).

Kathryn Montgomery, PhD, is the director of the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program and Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics and of Medicine. Her research interests are the epistemology of medicine and the use of literature in medical education. She is the author of Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge (Princeton) and How Doctors Think: Clinical Judgment and the Practice of Medicine (Oxford). She serves on the editorial boards of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine and the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice and is a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and a fellow of the Hastings Center.

David B. Morris, PhD, recently retired as University Professor at the University of Virginia. He has written two prize-winning books on British literature, including Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (1984). The Culture of Pain (1991), which won a PEN prize, initiated his work in biocultural studies. He further explores a biocultural perspective in three texts: Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (1998); Narrative, Pain, and Suffering (2005), co-edited with pain specialists Daniel B. Carr and John D. Loeser; and an issue of New Literary History (summer 2007), co-edited with Lennard J. Davis.

Judy Z. Segal, PhD, is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, her work is in rhetorical history and theory and rhetoric of health and medicine. She is author of Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (2005).  Her current research project is entitled, "Values and Public Persuasion: The Rhetoric of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising for Prescription Pharmaceuticals."

Richard Zaner, PhD, is A. G. Stahlman Professor Emeritus of Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Ethics in the Graduate Department of Religion and in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. He is author of Conversations on the Edge: Narratives of Ethics and Illness (2004), Ethics and the Clinical Encounter (1988) and Troubled Voices (1995).