University of North Texas 
Rewriting Narratives Through Medical Humanities
In an era where healthcare increasingly relies on data and efficiency, UNT English scholars are helping reintroduce the human story into medicine. The department’s growing emphasis on medical humanities explores how literature, storytelling, and rhetorical analysis can improve communication between patients, healthcare providers, and communities.
Faculty and students analyze patient narratives, memoirs, and illness-centered literature to better understand how individuals experience disease, treatment, and recovery. By examining how language shapes patient identity and medical decision-making, English scholars are helping future healthcare professionals recognize the emotional, cultural, and psychological dimensions of care.
“Graphic medicine is an interdisciplinary field that combines cartooning, storytelling, medical history, medical diagnosis, and/or personal explorations of struggles with disease, illness, or recovery,” says Dr. Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Assistant Professor of English.
“The field combines work from medical professionals, cartoonists and storytellers, individuals with disabilities, chronic or acute illness, academics, and advocates in order to provide compelling and easily accessible materials to patients, students, and the interested public that can help them better care for and understand their own healthy journeys. I look forward to teaching courses in graphic medicine—both graphic histories of medicine and courses that are focused more directly on memoirs or personal narratives about illness or disability—and helping students in a variety of disciplines to see how this field can enhance their own work in the field.”
Dr. Mary Lutze, Lecturer and Director of the UNT Writing Center, will be teaching the Medical Humanities course this fall utilizing the field of Disability Studies.
“My goal is to challenge students' perceptions of disabilities and illness as factors of identity rather than simply conditions one might experience. As a disabled person myself, I am intimately aware of just how inaccessible and unaccommodating our world can be. For many of us, recoveries or cures are never a possibility, and I believe that it's vital that students begin to consider disabled identities beyond the limitations of medical treatment and cure and further into questions of lived experience and embodiment.”
Literature and Medicine is one course in the Medical Humanities sequence, and this year’s class builds a complex picture of the role of narrative in medicine, healing, and wellness. Raina Joines, who is currently teaching the course, says “what we can think and express builds a picture of the world for each of us. Both the physician and the poet hope to observe with diligence, perceive and describe particulars, and trace the relations between our individual and collective experiences of mind and body.”
As a group, English faculty are the most active contributors to UNT’s Health and Medical Humanities certificate program, which is led by historian Jakob Burnham. Together, they are creating opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration with health-related programs where students will learn how storytelling can impact diagnosis, treatment adherence, and patient trust. Courses and research projects often examine how cultural narratives surrounding illness influence public perception of diseases, particularly in underserved populations. These efforts demonstrate that strong communication skills, long considered a cornerstone of English studies, can directly improve health outcomes.
“In general, literary studies places renewed interest on first-person narrative, a view from the ‘inside’ you might say, says Dr. Stephanie Hawkins, Professor of English.
“But literary studies also exercises ‘experience-dependent plasticity’, the way in which our encounters with texts, experimental writing, and estranging or ‘defamiliarizing’ representations of commonplace events can be transformative. Reading literature literally re-forms our neural networks and heightens our adaptability, our capacity to work with others, and be intentional in how to choose to develop as humans.”
Exploring Neurodiversity Through Narrative
UNT English faculty is also working alongside an interdisciplinary group of researchers to document, elevate, and understand the experiences of neurodiverse people, including members of the autistic community. This emerging collaboration examines how storytelling and narrative structures influence cognitive development and emotional processing.
English faculty are collaborating with rehabilitation studies researchers, historians, and design faculty on the Neuro-Narratives Project. This initiative will create an online museum, which will use multiple forms of storytelling, including creative writing, oral history, and art and design, to document the experiences of neurodiverse people. This public-facing resource will allow contributors to share their experiences and provide information needed to create public policy and research programs related to neurological differences. By analyzing autobiographical writing and personal storytelling from individuals living with neurological differences, researchers are uncovering how language helps shape identity and self-understanding. These studies expand academic research and create opportunities for advocacy, accessibility, and representation within both scientific and social spaces.
"These collaborations demonstrate how writing and literary study offer concrete insight into cognition—revealing how metaphor, narrative structure, and voice shape perception, memory, and self-concept. By engaging closely with lived accounts of neurological difference, the project also cultivates forms of empathy grounded not in abstraction, but in sustained attention to individual experience,” says Dr. Kimberly Grey, Assistant Professor of English.
“In doing so, Neuro-Narratives positions storytelling as both a method for understanding how the mind works and a means of expanding how communities care for and respond to one another.”
The work reflects the understanding that literature is not simply entertainment or cultural reflection. It is a cognitive tool that influences how humans process and shape information, form meaningful relationships, and interpret the world.
Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Humanistic Inquiry
While artificial intelligence is often associated with automation and technological advancement, some UNT English faculty are approaching AI as both a subject of study and a creative research partner. Curriculum is under development, which will examine how machine learning influences language, authorship, and communication while exploring ethical questions surrounding authorship, bias, and digital literacy.
The coursework in the new Digital Humanities Certificate, launching fall 2026, which is led by Dr. Greta Swain, Assistant Professor of History, teaches students how to analyze large text datasets, uncovering linguistic patterns and historical language shifts that would be difficult to track manually. These digital humanities approaches enable students to combine traditional literary and historical analysis with computational methods, preparing them for careers that demand both critical thinking and technological fluency.
Faculty are also encouraging students to explore how their skills as writers and critical thinkers can prepare them for future AI-related careers where humanities skills are needed just as much as technology know-how. AI generated writing reshapes ideas of creativity, originality, and authorship. By critiquing and collaborating with AI technologies, students develop skills in rhetorical evaluation and digital ethics, helping them understand the cultural implications of emerging technologies.
“I’m excited about bringing what I’ve learned on projects with Open AI and Nvidia to UNT,” says Associate Professor of English, Daniel Peña, who helps AI tech firms test new systems for safety and security. “With Large Language Model systems, writing is the new hacking. And novelists possess skills highly sought after in Tech. We have an understanding of the slippage of words and the way narratives can be used to reframe a prompt request to hack a system. So much of the future of cybersecurity is going to be narrative-based. And a foundation in the arts and humanities is going to be a cornerstone of that cybersecurity training.”
He goes on to say, "AI is about much more than what people think it is: writing bad essays or cheating. I think that is a very reductive view of AI as a tool. The agentic side of AI is very quickly curing medical ailments, crunching data, and finding new patterns previously unexamined even within the humanities.”
The Future of Humanities Is Spread Across Many Fields
The English faculty who are embracing interdisciplinary collaboration reflect a broader shift in higher education, one that recognizes that the humanities as essential to solving complex global challenges. By integrating medical humanities, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence into the humanities, UNT is preparing students to think critically across disciplines and adapt to evolving professional landscapes.
This innovative approach reinforces a central truth of humanities education. Technology and science may change how humans live and work, but understanding human experience remains at the heart of meaningful progress. At UNT, the study of the humanities is helping shape healthcare communication, neurological research, and the ethical development of artificial intelligence.
“Interdisciplinary scholarship conducted at the intersection of the humanities and science and technology demonstrate that humanists offer tools that are vital to improving the human experience,” says Dr. Jennifer Wallach, Professor of History and Divisional Dean of the Humanities. “The humanities disciplines not only preserve past human accomplishments and aid us in the present-day task of better understanding what it means to be human, they also provide us with the tools we need to create a more humane future.”