Dr. Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (2011) and Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2013). She teaches at the New School for Social Research and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York. She is a member of IPTAR and Das Unbehagen.
Christopher Lane is Professor of English and a member of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at Northwestern University. A former Guggenheim fellow, awarded the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, he specializes in 19th- and 20th-century psychology, psychiatry, and intellectual history, with books including Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), on behind-the-scenes changes to the DSM and the creation of the anxiety disorders, and Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (Yale, 2016), on Peale’s self-described “religio-psychiatric” clinic and movement in the 1950s. He is completing a book on bioethics, the biotech revolution, and the practical and political implications of the new neuroscience.
Venus Ginés, MA, P/CHWI is a 29-year breast cancer survivor, who survived cancer for the second time in 2017 after 25 years of survivorship. In 2018, Venus retired as faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, teaching cultural competence and health literacy, as well as conducting research on Latino medical mistrust.
From her personal experience with cancer and her sister’s untimely death to cervical cancer, Venus founded Día de la Mujer Latina, Inc., (DML), in 1997 as a national non-profit organization, celebrating its signature health fiesta in 40 states, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Dominican Republic, providing the medically underserved Latina community with culturally and linguistically proficient health education, early detection screening for chronic diseases, culturally-tailored preventive programs for Latino teens and patient-centered navigation. She also trained 4212 Promotores/Community Health Workers (P/CHWs) in Texas alone. Venus is a State Certified Instructor of P/CHWs with DML being the first approved bilingual Texas State Sponsored Certification Training Program. She chaired the Department of Health and Human Services National Promotores Initiative and has conducted P/CHW training for employees at the City of Houston and Austin’s Paramedics, and more recently the employees of a federally qualified health center. Venus continues to train many Promotores nationwide and in Latin America on key core competencies as it relates to our medically underserved communities. She developed bilingual training curriculum on subject matters that affects Latinas disproportionately such as Dispelling Myths and Rumors about Women’s Cancers, STDs, Patient Centered Care and Mental Health. The Autonomous University of Baja California Sur included Venus’s Promotora Curriculum as part of their 2019 Fall Training Program under Public Health. With her team of Instructors, she sponsored their training as Bilingual Mental Health First Aid Instructors and on April 16, 2021, achieved the goal of having the Governor’s Proclamation as Promotores/Community Health Worker Day in Texas.
Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and The New Engagement, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020). [travisclau.com]
