Title: Associate professor and Director of the Cohen Center for the Humanities
University: James Madison University
Email: kleinmj@jmu.edu
Website: educ.jmu.edu/~kleinmj/
Description of your work
I have two main foci I’m pursuing. First, I’m currently examining ways in which the rhetoric of health and medicine can be utilized in partnerships between universities and community organizations. I do this within the context of a community-based learning course focused on writing in the health sciences. Students from a variety of humanities and health science majors work in groups with clients to promote vaccine awareness, among other issues. Working together, the students can leverage their individual expertise (in writing, editing, health, etc.) in producing materials, while at the same time education one another.
Second, I teach a course that examines the way people use language to construct an idealized view of the human body. Students in the course create a textual narrative to describe their own experiences in having their body judged/observed. They then take this narrative and turn it into a graphic memoir. I examine ways in which students navigate moving from a genre they are familiar with (textual narrative) to one they are less familiar with (graphical memoir) in discussing a personal, and often emotional, experience.