Emily Beckman
School of Liberal Arts Medical Humanities and Health Studies Program
Expert Bio
Emily Beckman is director and associate professor of medical humanities and health studies in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, and co-director of the scholarly concentration in medical humanities at the Indiana University School of Medicine. She has been working on merging the humanities and medicine for many years. More specifically, she recognizes that there is a critical need for a broader understanding of medicine, and continues to work to incorporate the humanities — literature, history and ethics — into both the liberal arts curriculum and the medical education experience.
She teaches courses with a focus on the literary representation of illness, with a specific focus on mental illness and addiction. Beckman’s favorite course to teach, however, relies on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” as a leaping off point for exploring the interdisciplinary field of medical/health humanities in particular, and the human experience more broadly.
Her academic and research interests include global access to palliative care, narrative medicine, empathy in medical education and practice, and the relatively recent history of institutionalization in Indiana, with a specific focus on the former Central State Hospital, Indiana’s landmark psychiatric institution, which closed in 1994.
More recently, Beckman co-founded a new nonprofit organization, Build Community Give Care, to address health disparities in West and sub-Saharan Africa. Relying on an effective altruism framework, her team has created a scholarship program to increase access to palliative care education in areas where these services are desperately needed.
Areas of Expertise
Humanities in medical education, narrative medicine, literature and medicine, empathy in medical education/practice, Indiana’s Central State Hospital, palliative care in West and sub-Saharan Africa.
