Dr. Bentley-Edwards studies how race, racial socialization, and racism affect the health and well-being of children and adults. Beyond identifying disparities, she also investigates the ways that systems can be improved and how cultural strengths can be used to promote resiliency and positive health outcomes in African Americans throughout their lives. Her research has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and her work has been published in scholarly journals and featured in a range of local and national media outlets. Learn more about Dr. Bentley-Edwards research and latest publications here. 

In her role as Director of the Institute for Community and Economic Engagement (ICEE), Emily Janke leads and supports initiatives that encourage, support, elevate, and amplify faculty, staff, student, and community colleague community-engaged teaching, learning, research, creative activity, and service. An important aspect of this role is connecting and convening community-engaged scholars within and beyond the university to focus on community-identified priorities through partnership. Emily’s scholar-administrative work focuses on  community engagement and public service, community-engaged scholarship, conflict management, innovations in scholarly communications, collaborative communication, and restorative practices. Her conversation with Jennifer Ahern-Dodson and Rebecca Dumlao during the Engaged Scholars Retreat can be found here.

Nicole Barnes researches public health and medicine in twentieth-century China from a gendered perspective, incorporating the changing life stories of men and women into my analysis of how health regulations and medical practices reflect Chinese society's principal values as well as the assumptions and political goals of state actors. Her first book,  Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945 (University of California Press, 2018), has just been published. She has participated in faculty writing groups, retreats, and taken advantage of other Duke resources to support faculty book writers. Nicole joined the First Book Faculty Writing Group to discuss her experience writing her first book. She shares her suggestions here. 

Ed Balleisen is associate professor of history and public policy whose research has led to collaborations with faculty from law, business, environment and other units. 

Kelley Swain, award-winning writer/poet and contributing writer to the Lancet, works at the crossroads of poetry and science. Medical education in the US has increasingly found the humanities relevant to training more effective and empathetic doctors. Swain considers how narrative medicine and creative writing expand physicians’ writing skills and invite them to explore the humanity in their practice. Is there a similar value for introducing the humanities to Global Health?

Sally Kornbluth is a cell biologist and the James B. Duke Professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology. She was appointed Duke University Provost on July 1, 2014. As the university’s chief academic officer, Kornbluth leads Duke’s schools and institutes, as well as admissions, financial aid, libraries, information technology and other facets of the university’s academic life. Her writing life includes not only disciplinary research, but also developing university documents such as the Duke Strategic Plan. Provost Kornbluth shares how her discipline shapes her writing life as an administrator and the joys and challenges of writing in a new context.

Monique Dufour directs the medicine and society minor, has directed the University Writing Program, and was a faculty development consultant at Virginia Tech’s Center for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Dr. Dufour’s research focuses on the history of the book, medical humanities, and literature.

Kristen Neuschel is associate professor of history and directs the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University. Most of her published research has focused on aspects of aristocratic life in France. In her work, she makes use of letters, household accounts, muster rolls, inventories of clothing, jewels, furniture and, most recently, weapons from 15th- and 16th-century noblemen and women. In recent years, she has branched out into writing essays, fiction and memoir to reflect on lives in the past with more creative license than conventional scholarship allows and to share those explorations with broader audiences.

Julie Reynolds is associate professor of the practice of biology. Her active research program focuses on pedagogies that promote science literacy, particularly Writing-to-Learn strategies, and her current Writing-to-Learn research is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Robert Thompson is professor emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, where he has served as head of the division of medical psychology, director of the undergraduate program in human development, Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, and Vice Povost for Undergraduate Education. Dr. Thompson’s publications include Changing the Conversation about Higher Education (2013) and Beyond Reason and Tolerance: The Purpose and Practice of Higher Education (2014).