English professor Lorenzo Servitje has been awarded a $149,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to establish the Integrational Health Humanities and Allied Sciences Lab (IH²AS), a revolutionary initiative that brings together the humanities and health sciences as equal partners in addressing complex health challenges.
Led by Servitje, the three-year grant will support the development of innovative interdisciplinary research and graduate education programs that incorporate history, ethics, literature, and philosophy into health sciences training.
“In calculus, an integral defines the area under the curve between two points,” said Servitje, associate professor of English and Health, Medicine & Society. “In linguistics and cognitive psychology, integration is the process of mapping information across domains. Our integrals aim to do just that: map knowledge between 1) disciplines and 2) teaching and research.”
The IH²AS Lab will establish a new graduate certificate in population health and humanities and support interdisciplinary research units called "integrals" that center on humanistic questions related to health. Each integral includes collaboration between humanities scholars and faculty or graduate students in the health and allied sciences, developing both research and curricular components.
Spotlight Recipient
Lorenzo Servitje
Associate Professor