Category: News

On May 14, 2025, Professor Jürgen Pieters, literary scholar at Ghent University and director of CHARM, delivers a guest lecture at the Stanford Humanities Center titled Please Read Carefully: The Healing Powers of Fiction. This event is part of the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop in the Medical Humanities, co-organised by CHARM Member Laura Wittman (Associate professor of French and Italian literature and culture at Stanford University).

In his lecture, Pieters explores the consolatory and therapeutic potential of literature. Drawing on the works of Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, and Donald Winnicott, he reflects on reading as a form of care and self-care, situating it within the broader tradition of bibliotherapy.

Pieters is the author of Literature and Consolation: Fictions of Comfort (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and is currently working on a new book on bibliotherapeutic reading. His lecture underscores the significance of literary engagement in moments of distress—a theme central to CHARM’s mission to explore the intersections of care, health, and the arts.

For more information on the event: https://shc.stanford.edu/stanford-humanities-center/events/jurgen-pieters-please-read-carefully-healing-powers-fiction

On Thurday, October 17, 2024, the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, and the Ghent University Museum (GUM) have appointed the 40^th Sarton Chair of History of Science to  Prof. dr. Rina Knoeff, Aletta Jacobs Chair of Health and Humanities (University of Groningen).

2023, November: Prof. dr. Alice Scavarda (University of Turin) is the first CHARM Chair holder

Prof. dr. Alice Scavarda is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin (Italy). She is trained as a medical sociologist and co-founded and co-directed the international research group ESA Epistemic Community on Welfare Disability Policies in Europe (2021-2023). She is a member of the Advisory Board of the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology (ESHMS) and a founding member of Graphic Medicine Italia. Her main research interests are disability, chronic illness and prevention, with a focus on stigma and medicalisation. She is also interested in analysing the methodological and ethical features of creative methods, in particular comics and applied theatre.

Francqui Medal awarded to Arthur W. Frank

As suggested by both the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy and the Medicine and Health Sciences Faculty, Ghent University awarded Arthur W. Frank with a Francqui Medal for scientific excellence. Arthur W. Frank is a Health Sociologist from the University of Calgary, Canada. His inaugural lecture took place in Vandenhove and addressed “Anxious Voices in Shakespeare, Heidegger and Healthcare”.
CHARM group leader Jürgen Pieters wrote a short introduction to Frank’s work for this website. (in Dutch).