CONWAY, Ark. (March 6, 2013) - Physician and writer Dr. Sayantani DasGupta will present "Our Bodies, Our Stories" Monday, March 11, at 7:30 p.m. in Reves Recital Hall.
DasGupta is an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics and a faculty member of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She also teaches in the graduate program in Health Advocacy at Sarah Lawrence College and is a prose faculty member in the summer writing conference "Writing the Medical Experience," also at Sarah Lawrence.
DasGupta is co-author of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales (1995), author of Her Own Medicine: A Woman's Journey from Student to Doctor (1999), and co-editor of Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies (2007). Her work has appeared in journals including The Lancet, JAMA, Pediatrics, The Hastings Center Report, Literature and Medicine, Teaching and Learning in Medicine, and The Journal of Medical Humanities. She is an associate editor of the journal Literature and Medicine, and her current interests are issues of gender and race in illness narratives, and genomic narratives in film. Dr. DasGupta holds an A.B. from Brown University and an M.D./M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University.
In her dual roles as practicing physician and publishing writer, DasGupta works every day at the intersection of literature and medicine. Her medical practice plunges her into drama, description, and oral history relating to wellness and illness; her writing, teaching, and editing give her opportunities to put those experiences into words. Her teaching and discussion will illuminate the ways in which we use narrative to describe our bodies, illnesses, and recoveries, and the ways in which alert physicians avail themselves of those narratives to become better healers.
This program is part of the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language series exploring the theme of "Literature and Medicine."
The event is free and open to the public. A book signing and reception in Trieschmann Gallery will follow. For more information about this and future events, please contact Henryetta Vanaman, 501-450-4597 or vanaman@hendrix.edu.
Founded in 1876, Hendrix College is a national leader in engaged liberal arts and sciences education. For the fifth consecutive year, Hendrix was named one of the country's "Up and Coming" liberal arts colleges by U.S. News and World Report. Hendrix is featured in the 2012 edition of the Princeton Review as one of the country's best 377 colleges, the latest edition of Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges, Forbes magazine's annual list of America's Top 650 Colleges, and the 2013 edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For more information, visit www.hendrix.edu.