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