Race and Mental Health in History and Literature

FAIN: FV-231181-15

Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, VA 24061-2000)
Matthew M. Heaton (Project Director: February 2015 to April 2017)

A three-week seminar for sixteen school teachers on the political, social, and scientific relationship between race and mental health in the United States and Africa as seen through the humanities and other disciplines.   

This seminar will examine the question of how the political, social, and scientific relationship between race and mental health has been articulated in its historical, literary, and medical contexts in both the United States and Africa since the late nineteenth century, emphasizing connections and comparisons across space, time, and disciplinary perspectives.The seminar will provide teachers with an opportunity to read classic texts that explore the relationship between race and mental health in the United States and Africa as well as studies on the subject by historians, anthropologists, literary theorists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Participants will also pursue research topics of their own choosing, using primary sources that range from literary works to scientific studies to old case files of psychiatric patients.