Category: News

Zeynep Saban, our CHARM intern who stayed with us for three months over the summer, has left a testimonial about her stay in Ghent.

Staying Local, Thinking Global

 

The moment I jotted down this title, I realized how it appeared to jar against the backdrop of a world increasingly marked by regional conflicts, widespread distrust, and extreme conservatism.

Yet this is how I felt during my 6-week stay at Ghent as the CHARM chair in 2025.

CHARM stands for the Consortium for Health Humanities, Arts, Reading and Medicine, a delightful acronym that also doubles as a mission statement. It signals a global network committed to bridging humanities, medicine and care through an interdisciplinary lens, with a particular emphasis on ‘reading,’ the signature strength of Ghent’s Health Humanities group and, indeed, the fundamental method of the humanities in general.

My honor to be appointed as the CHARM chair allowed me firsthand insight into the network, its organizational processes, and the vibrant events held in Ghent and beyond. I met the CHARM team, had some lovely conversations, joined a few reading sessions, but the centerpiece was undoubtedly the Annual Season School in August. This three-day session, entitled ‘Literature and Culture as Practices of Care,’ was held at Museum Dr. Guislain, built on Belgium’s first insane asylum in 1857–in short, a perfect site for a health humanities gathering.

Each day featured two keynote speeches by distinguished scholars in the field and two panels of presentations from early-career researchers. Each keynote speech lasted about one hour, followed by a 30-min discussion. In the panels, each presenter had ten minutes to outline their work-in-progress project, followed by 30-min feedback from two experts, along with comments and questions from the group.

The program mirrored the trends shaping health humanities today. Long-standing themes from literature, philosophy, narrative, and reading were joined by emerging topics in graphic medicine, neurodiversity, media studies, digital storytelling, comparative linguistics, and more. All converged on a vision of care as a collaborative, lived, and creative act rather than merely a clinical prescription. Yet the medical voice was never sidelined. One practitioner’s testimony underscored the imperative for health humanities to forge bridges between the clinic and the academy.

This major event in August spoke eloquently to CHARM’s global outreach as it drew participants and speakers from institutions across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. Looking ahead, I was told that CHARM will continue to deepen partnerships around the world and particularly in the Global South. With the rise of medical/health humanities in the past decades, regional institutions have emerged to represent context-specific cases while also speaking to the broader human condition. Independent initiatives may be self-sufficient, but new ideas, creative projects, and interdisciplinary collaborations often arise from deep, in-person, committed exchanges. Although the age of AI promises barrier-free communication, the information cocoon it weaves can become yet another box that’s hard to escape. I suppose this is the meaning of CHARM: to build a network that becomes a hub for alternative possibilities.

Perhaps this is the true charm of CHARM. How did it affect me, then? There are many memorable moments, but one stands out when I felt ‘local’ in Ghent for the first time, tracing the city’s medieval landscape on a rented bike. The saying is that everyone in this third-most populous city in Belgium owns at least one bike. Even the Uber driver who took me to the train station proudly shared stories of his three bikes and the heroic wounds and injuries from his cycling adventures. This, and many other specific episodes, blended into my lived experience in Ghent. They reminded me that health is something daily, tactile, and communal, and that even amid global turbulence, the local pulse can set the pace for change.

 

What I’ve described above are abstract reflections. It is the concrete people here who turn ideas into actual presence. I want to thank the CHARM ‘gang’ in Ghent: Zeynep and Luna, I wish your projects all the success; Zoë and Jürgen, I know I’ve thanked you many times already but here is another one for bringing CHARM to life.

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).