In her dual roles as practicing physician and publishing writer, Sayantani DasGupta works every day at the intersection of literature and medicine. Her medical practice plunges her into drama, description, and oral history relating to wellness and illness; her writing, teaching, and editing give her opportunities to put those experiences into words.
DasGupta will present “Our Bodies, Our Stories,” part of the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language series exploring the theme of “Literature and Medicine.”
The presentation will take place Monday, March 11, at 7:30 p.m. in Reves Recital Hall on the Hendrix College campus. A book signing and reception in Trieschmann Gallery will follow. The event is free and open to the public.
Her teaching and discussion will illuminate the ways in which we use narrative to describe our bodies, illnesses, and recoveries, and the ways in which alert physicians avail themselves of those narratives to become better healers.
DasGupta is an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics and a faculty member of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She also teaches in the graduate program in Health Advocacy at Sarah Lawrence College and is a prose faculty member in the summer writing conference “Writing the Medical Experience,” also at Sarah Lawrence.
DasGupta is co-author of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales (1995), author of Her Own Medicine: A Woman’s Journey from Student to Doctor (1999), and co-editor of Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies (2007). Her work has appeared in journals including The Lancet, JAMA, Pediatrics, The Hastings Center Report, Literature and Medicine, Teaching and Learning in Medicine, and The Journal of Medical Humanities. She is an associate editor of the journal Literature and Medicine, and her current interests are issues of gender and race in illness narratives, and genomic narratives in film. Dr. DasGupta holds an A.B. from Brown University and an M.D./M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University.
This event is sponsored by the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language, which are designed to enhance and enrich the study and teaching of literature and language at Hendrix College. For more information about this and future events, please contact Henryetta Vanaman, 501-450-4597 or vanaman@hendrix.edu