Welcome to UCI’s Center for Medical Humanities (CMH). We offer a thoroughly interdisciplinary and interprofessional approach to understanding how people make meaning out of experiences of embodiment and all that it entails, especially those of vulnerability wrought by illness or disability. We also seek to critically engage the role that social and cultural expectations play in the creation of stigmas placed on people considered sick or disabled. Through scholarship, creative endeavors, critical reflection, and public engagement, CMH explores the profound effects that illness, disease, and disability bring to the social worlds in which people live. CMH marshals the intellectual and creative resources of faculty, students, and staff from three robust schools at UCI—Arts, Humanities, and Medicine—and partners with colleagues in other schools to build a collaborative environment that is trenchant and open-ended in its questions.

This year, we are excited to host a series of events sponsored by the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar. The theme, “Suffer Well,” brings scholars, activists, and artists to campus to dialogue with UCI faculty, staff, students, and clinicians, as well as members of the public, to think together about the place of suffering in our social worlds, and what emerges intellectually when we lean into and confront directly the place of suffering in human experience. We hope you journey with us and ask questions … and stay to figure out answers together.

James Kyung-Jin Lee
Director, Center for Medical Humanities
Associate Professor of Asian American Studies