Lectures and Events
The events below include our biweekly Montgomery Lectures, other events we host, and relevant events hosted by other groups at Northwestern University and its affiliated clinical partners.
The Montgomery Lectures Series is presented biweekly on Thursdays from noon to 12:45pm, and is open to all. Presenters are faculty in the Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics program, CBMH members, and special guests. This series was named in 2013 for Emeritus Professor Kathryn Montgomery.
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The views expressed by speakers are their own. The hosting, organizing, or listing of events does not imply endorsement of any views expressed.
Oct
01
Flash(y) Bioethics: Five-Minute Takes on Five Topics - MHB Faculty
Chicago - 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program
Presents
A Montgomery Lecture
Flash(y) Bioethics: Five-Minute Takes on Five Topics
Come join us for a fun introduction to our faculty and our field! Our MA students have come up with 5 topics for us explore in a pithy 5 minutes or less, providing a sampling of the diversity of issues engaged by the medical humanities and bioethics, and the breadth of the disciplinary approaches we bring to them. Here s who will be there and the topics!
Sarah Rodriguez (History)
Eugenics
Megan Crowley-Matoka (Anthropology)
Medicalization of Neuropsychiatric Disorders
Tod Chambers (Religion/Bioethics)
Community
Katie Watson (Law)
Surveillance
Catherine Belling (Literature)
Sin
This lecture is open to the public and will be held in the Searle Seminar Room in the Lurie Research Building (303 E Superior St), Chicago Campus. For those outside the Chicago area and anyone who would prefer to attend remotely, a Zoom option is also available.
Only Zoom attendees are required to register
** PLEASE REGISTER TO RECEIVE THE ZOOM LINK**
REGISTER HERE
Read more about this series | Sign up for lecture announcements
Oct
08
Animating the Virtual Bodies of the Dead - Molly Hales
Chicago - 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics
Presents
A Montgomery Lecture
With
Molly Hales, MD, PhD
Instructor, Biological Sciences Division
University of Chicago
Animating the Virtual Bodies of the Dead
In Chicago, a high school teacher finds herself drawn again and again to her late brother s Facebook profile page, hypnotized by the shifting content that animates and re-animates him. In northern California, a woman logs entries in a self-made smartphone app that records moments when her mother suddenly becomes present. In Britain, a young woman repeatedly visits the online memorial that hypnotically submerses her in memories of her dead friend. As digital media offer novel ways to presence and re-presence the dead, both the living and the dead are haunted in new ways, shifting relationships to both media and death. This talk explores death and digital media through the story of Mike and Alex, best friends who embark on an ambitious plan to recreate Mike s late father as an avatar in virtual reality. Using online and offline participant-observation, serial interviews, media analyses, and auto-ethnography, I show how the intimacy between Mike and his late father is made possible by the mediating presence of his friend Alex, by the virtual reality platform, and by the wider social and therapeutic field that has shaped how such technologies are understood and accessed. The qualities of depth, immersion, and presence around which virtual reality has defined itself opened up a space for George to grow into something more than a cartoon, providing the locus of an ongoing relation with his son. Their story invites us to reconsider the frontiers of intimacy, the fragmentation of identity and relationality in a digitally-mediated age, and emergent post-death rituals in the United States and beyond.
This lecture is open to the public and will be held in the Searle Seminar Room in the Lurie Research Building (303 E Superior St), Chicago Campus. For those outside the Chicago area and anyone who would prefer to attend remotely, a Zoom option is also available.
Only Zoom attendees are required to register
** PLEASE REGISTER TO RECEIVE THE ZOOM LINK**
REGISTER HERE
Read more about this series | Sign up for lecture announcements
Oct
22
Representing the Unrepresented: How Simulated Ethics Review Committees Can Help Define Best Interests for Patients Without Surrogates - Paul Hutchison
Chicago - 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics
Presents
A Montgomery Lecture
With
Paul Hutchison, MD, MA, HEC-C
Associate Professor of Medicine and Bioethics
Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care
Loyola University Medical Center
Maywood, Illinois
Representing the Unrepresented: How Simulated Ethics
Review Committees Can Help Define Best Interests for
Patients Without Surrogates
Unrepresented patients those without capacity, advance directives, or a surrogate decision maker comprise one of the most challenging populations of patients in medicine. Consensus supports the use of multidisciplinary review committees to make important decisions for these patients. However, it is unclear how to best assemble these committees and how they should use the best interest standard in their deliberations. In this discussion, this talk will describe the attempt to study these committees through virtual simulation and learn how they apply the best interest standard to a sick patient whose values are unknowable.
This lecture is open to the public and will be held in the Searle Seminar Room in the Lurie Research Building (303 E Superior St), Chicago Campus. For those outside the Chicago area and anyone who would prefer to attend remotely, a Zoom option is also available.
Only Zoom attendees are required to register
** PLEASE REGISTER TO RECEIVE THE ZOOM LINK**
REGISTER HERE
Read more about this series | Sign up for lecture announcements
Nov
05
No Empire is an Island: Quarantine and US-British Inter-Imperiality in the Caribbean and the Pacific - Bassam Sidiki
Chicago - 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program
Presents
A Montgomery Lecture
With
Bassam Sidiki, PhD
Assistant Professor of English
University of Texas at Austin
No Empire is an Island: Quarantine and US-British Inter-Imperiality
in the Caribbean and the Pacific
In 1962, two very different archipelagic nations achieved independence from Britain: Samoa in the Pacific Ocean, and Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. One feature among many that unites these ostensibly insular territories in the twentieth century is how they became sites of intense inter-imperial contestation (and collaboration) between the British Empire and the increasingly ascendant US Empire. Drawing on a wide range of archives and cultural texts, Sidiki argues that infectious disease discourse and the practices of quarantine in Samoa (1918 influenza pandemic) and Trinidad (1940s-50s leprosy) were key to facilitating these inter-imperial encounters but also decolonizing movements and postcolonial literary sensibilities.
This lecture is open to the public and will be held in the Searle Seminar Room in the Lurie Research Building (303 E Superior St), Chicago Campus. For those outside the Chicago area and anyone who would prefer to attend remotely, a Zoom option is also available.
Only Zoom attendees are required to register
** PLEASE REGISTER TO RECEIVE THE ZOOM LINK**
REGISTER HERE
Read more about this series | Sign up for lecture announcements
Nov
19
Tom Buller - Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program
Chicago - 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
The Montgomery Lecture series addresses diverse topics within bioethics and the medical humanities. Presenters are faculty, affiliates, and alumni of the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Graduate Program along with special guests. The lectures run every other Thursday from noon to 12:45pm during The Graduate School's fall, winter, and spring quarters. They are open to students, faculty, and the general public. Formerly titled, "Special Topics in MH&B," this series was renamed in 2013 for Emeritus Professor Kathryn Montgomery.
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This lecture is open to the public and will be held in the Searle Seminar Room in the Lurie Research Building (303 E Superior St), Chicago Campus. For those outside the Chicago area and anyone who would prefer to attend remotely, a Zoom option is also available.
Only Zoom attendees are required to register
** PLEASE REGISTER TO RECEIVE THE ZOOM LINK**
REGISTER HERE
Read more about this series | Sign up for lecture announcements