Sarah  Berry

Sarah L. Berry’s teaching and research focus on the interaction between narrative and health equity activism in U.S. movements for social justice. 

Professor Berry is co-president of the Health Humanities Consortium, where she is active in advancing medical and health humanities as a transdisciplinary academic field. She has inaugurated federal data collection on medical and health humanities education via a new CIP code; participated in creating a new toolkit for health humanities educators; co-publishes an annual survey of programs offering health humanities (Case Western Reserve U., 2022); researches and consults on curriculum design, program assessment, and outcomes (where health humanities graduates go); and, with colleagues, is collecting input from programs in North America and developing accreditation models for the field. She leads the summer Medical and Health Humanities Institute, a clinical internship and seminar program funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at Centre College, Rhodes College, and Sewanee: The University of the South that immerses pre-health students in social contexts of illness and regional determinants of health and equips them to become advocates for equity.

Her essays on nineteenth-century authors’ health activism have appeared in Mosaic, Journal of Medical Humanities (Springer), and in edited collections; articles on narrative and healthcare equity movements from the early republic through the Civil Rights era up to #BLM and COVID appear in Synapsis (Columbia U.), reference works, and edited collections; and her studies on the field of health humanities appear in Academic Medicine, Medical Humanities (BMJ), Research Methods in Health Humanities (Oxford), a guest-edited special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities, and other venues. She is currently revising an article about restorative justice in medical experimentation as dramatized in the sci-fi television series Black Mirror and researching a book tentatively titled Just Health: The Futures of Health, Care, and Equity in U.S. America.

Courses Taught:

Health and Social Justice from Abolition to #BLM
Public Health 201