“Instead of, ‘Oh, I see from your chart that you have congestive heart failure, so tell me how your breathing is,’ I started by rolling my chair away from the computer, putting my hands in my lap, not writing, not typing, and said: ‘I will be your doctor, so I need to know a lot about you. Tell me what you think I should know about your situation,’” Charon recalls.

“One woman replied, ‘You mean you want me to talk?’ That tells you something about her prior experience with doctors.”

Charon, a 1970 Fordham graduate, is the founder of narrative medicine, which calls for listening to patients’ personal stories and responding in ways that enhance their care. A Harvard-trained physician and a literary scholar, she is a professor of medicine and the founding chair of medical humanities and ethics at Columbia University.

When patients are invited to share their stories, they often provide a lot of information and context. “One woman said, ‘Well, I didn’t tell you about the fire in our house in Panama,’ which turned out to be really pivotal for this patient. Or, ‘I didn’t tell you that my daughter is in prison,’ or ‘I didn’t tell you that I was in prison, but here, I brought you a book of poems that I wrote while I was in prison,’” Charon says.

Nonverbal cues are also important, she adds. “As I’m gathering everything I might come to know about this person, I’m listening to her words. I’m looking at her face. I’m noticing her gestures. I’m noticing the smell of her body. I’m reacting to any kind of emotional cues that may or may not be said, all that stuff.”

Charon quickly realized that having the doctor and patient work together to better understand the patient’s condition added value to the typical topline diagnosis. “Some physicians, especially those in the surgical specialties, will say to me, ‘Rita, I leave that for the social workers. I need to find out if the patient can bear weight on the new hip.’ Well, do that, but let’s also address the problem that the patient came to us for help with. And sometimes it’s a social problem. Sometimes they can’t afford the medicine, so they don’t take it. Sometimes it’s, ‘I didn’t want to tell you how much alcohol I drink.’

“With this approach,” she says, “we have a better shot from the start in addressing the problems that the patient herself considers problems, and not restricting that to things that have diagnostic codes.”

‘A Person Who Questions How Things Are Done’

While medicine ran in her family—Charon’s father was a family doctor, and one of her grandfathers was a physician as well—she didn’t plan to follow the same path. She describes her college-age self as a young Catholic kid from Providence, Rhode Island. “My parents let me come to New York only if I’d study with the Jesuits,” she recalls. She began her undergraduate studies at Thomas More College, Fordham’s liberal arts college for women at the time, but switched to the University’s experimental Bensalem College and was part of its inaugural class in 1967. (The college closed in 1974.)

At Bensalem, she says, “we took very seriously questions like, how do you learn, and what is learning? It helped me to become a person who questions how things are done, especially in terms of how we learn and how we grow.”

Charon went on to medical school at Harvard, but returned to New York City for her residency at Montefiore Hospital and became interested in the ideas of the bioethicists, historians, and other scholars working in what came to be known as the medical humanities.

During her residency, the work of Henry James captivated Charon so much that what began as a side interest turned into a doctorate at Columbia University. “I became a literary scholar and an internist at the same time,” Charon says. “My study of literature made me a different kind of doctor, and I realized also that what I knew about medicine contributed to the study of literature.”

‘Letting People’s Voices Be Heard’

In the 20 years since Charon coined the term, narrative medicine has been adopted more and more widely; Columbia, Temple University, Ohio State, and other institutions have begun narrative medicine programs. Charon’s research has won funding from both the National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and she is the author of the book Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford University Press, 2006). Her workshops attract people from across disciplines.

“I’ve found that when I’m able to enact these narrative techniques with patients and families, I feel a stronger bond with them,” says Dr. Daniel Eison, an oncology hospitalist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who studied narrative medicine with Charon. “Narrative medicine is even more important for patients from a racial, religious, or socioeconomic minority. They’re very disempowered in these settings, and narrative medicine seeks to acknowledge the power differentials and level the field a little bit by letting people’s voices be heard.”

As part of the fight against the novel coronavirus, Charon has been making more narrative medicine resources available to caregivers and working to help clinicians and medical students reduce their social isolation using online tools.

“We’ve had a robust international response to these training sessions,” Charon says. “The creative work they are able to do and the responses they receive from their writing is soul-building, and led one emergency department physician to tell us, ‘I was able to breathe for the first time all week at your session.’”

—Chris Quirk is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.

The two-week summer institute will take place in 2018 on the Wesleyan campus, with some two-dozen members of faculty from institutions around the nation invited to participate. Grimm said the seminar will encourage university faculty to offer their students practical courses in everyday philosophy, rooted in intellectual rigor.

“There’s been a dumbing down of some of these ancient traditions; if it’s not an ad on the subway, it’s [the word]‘mindfulness,’” said Grimm. “We’re all overwhelmed by technology, and it’s hard to find space to reflect, breathe, and find perspective. The ancient traditions have insight into how to avoid being swept along with the affairs of the day.”

Grimm said the institute is part of an ongoing revival of interest in “philosophy as a way of life,” which “is grounded in our basic human desire to live well.”

“We’ve always had to desire to live well,” he said. “Maybe for some people it is tied to traditional sources of advice, like religious sources.”

He said he finds that the various religious philosophies—from Stoicism to Buddhism to Confucianism to Existentialism—complement his beliefs as a Christian.

“But even if you were coming at the ‘way of life’ approach with no commitments or religious beliefs, these are still fascinating ways on how to deal with things like technology, which has practically been weaponized through the constant texting, emailing, and social media,” he said. “Each of us needs time to step back and analyze these things thoughtfully, and learn how to train our attention on what’s important in life.”

He said that without an understanding of the various ways of reasoning, any philosophy could be imposed.
“If you don’t choose it, the culture will do that for you,” he said.

An integral part of the Fordham core curriculum, philosophy also plays a much larger role in one’s career, said Grimm, whose own groundbreaking research on understanding earned Fordham its largest-ever humanities grant.

Related Articles: 

Philosopher Earns Fordham’s Largest Humanities Award, a $3.56 Million Templeton Grant

Fordham is one of 28 colleges and universities to win a Next Generation PhD matching grant, which aims to overhaul doctoral programs in the humanities to better prepare students for 21st-century job prospects within and outside of academia.

“The future of doctoral training in the humanities depends on innovative models that will deliver the competencies and skills that doctorate holders need to succeed in a variety of career pathways, in addition to traditional faculty lines,” said Eva Badowska, PhD, dean of GSAS and grant director, alongside co-director, Matthew McGowan, PhD, associate professor of classics.

“As a graduate school within a Jesuit university recognized for its strengths in the humanities, GSAS is uniquely situated to ask what it means truly to prepare our doctoral candidates for the fast-changing world of higher education and for the new knowledge economy,” Badowska said.

Historically, doctoral programs have prepared graduates solely for work in academia. However, with a 30 percent decline in academic job postings in the humanities since 2008, this singular focus is no longer realistic for students graduating from these programs.

“Thousands of professors are currently in the business of preparing thousands of graduate students for jobs that don’t exist,” Leonard Cassuto, PhD, professor of English and a collaborator on the project, said in his recent book, The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2013).

The $25,000 planning grant, to be matched by an additional $25,000 from GSAS, will not only propose rethinking Fordham’s five doctoral programs in the humanities (classics, English, history, philosophy, and theology), but will also examine what a 21st-century PhD program at any institution should encompass. For instance, what advanced transferrable skills should be taught at the doctoral level? Should skills such as collaborative teamwork and advanced digital proficiency be treated on a par with traditional emphases, such as mastery of field-specific knowledge and independent research skills?

In addition to Badowska and McGowan, the project includes a Core Planning Group and Constituent Advisory Group comprising GSAS faculty, current doctoral candidates, alumni, and community leaders who would benefit from hiring graduates with doctoral-level expertise.

At the end of the academic year, the group will produce a white paper detailing the proposed model.

“We want to rethink how we deliver the PhD at our University, but also make it scalable to other institutions and humanities programs,” said Melissa Labonte, PhD, associate dean of GSAS and associate professor of political science. “To do right by the students in these programs, we need to rethink the entire model. This planning grant will allow us to begin this process.”

A key part of the grant will address making doctoral programs in the humanities more inclusive of underrepresented, underserved, and marginalized communities, Labonte said. Within these groups, the percentage of students who enroll in a doctoral-level program has dropped precipitously in recent decades.

“We’re trying to find ways to counter this trend,” Labonte said. “This part of the grant falls very much in line with Fordham’s mission. If we’re going to embrace progressivism and social justice models, then we have to think about how PhD programs in the humanities will address the needs of people from underserved communities.”

The NEH announced the Next Generation PhD grants winners on Aug. 9 as part of $79 million in grants for 290 humanities projects and programs across the country, an initiative the group undertook to mark its 50th anniversary year.

The grant will allow Lise Schreier, PhD, an associate professor of French, to devote the 2016-17 academic year to completing research on her forthcoming book, The Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.

“A grant such as this is significant for the Department of Modern Languages and Literature because it makes us visible as strong researchers,” said Schreier, whose specializations include 19th-century French literature, French colonialism, and race and racism.

“We are a research-oriented department with a variety of courses. Teaching language is a pathway to understanding various cultures.”

Schreier, a native of Saint-Étienne, France, is studying the 18th-century phenomenon of child-gifting, the practice of purchasing or kidnapping dark-skinned children in Senegal, Algeria, India, and the Ottoman Empire as travel souvenirs and fashion accessories for upper-class French women.

Archival material about child-gifting is scant, and few scholars have undertaken research on the practice. Schreier’s own investigation has required some creative thinking as she shifted from letters to literature to artwork searching for clues of these children’s existence.

Some evidence came from mentions of the children in letters between wealthy French women. “Other information comes up in places like letters to tailors, which shows how these children were dressed, where they lived in the castles, how much money was spent on them,” she said.

Schreier is also interested in later references to child-gifting that appear in books assigned to French schoolchildren, which often involved a young character who was given a dark-skinned child as a gift. She argues that even after the abolition of slavery in France, when the actual practice of child-gifting ended, these stories served to inculcate colonial ideals in young French citizens.

The message of the books, Schreier said, was that “the French had to raise their children in such a way as to make them good, strong colonial citizens. This started in schools—particularly with girls, who were used to reading books about dolls, reading how to interact with a doll, raise a doll, educate a doll.

“These young readers, already used to being responsible for a doll, would be given a book in which an African boy was gifted to a French child in place of a doll. The inference they were expected to make was that it was normal to take care of a black child, just like a doll. When they’re older, it was hoped, they’d already be used to thinking of colonial subjects as their responsibility.”

This also points to the significant role that women played in advancing French colonialism, Schreier contends.

“From paintings of Old Regime noblewomen adorned with flattering attestations to their wealth, to 1870s moralistic novels featuring women advancing the Third Republic’s ‘civilizing mission’ with the loyal help of their dark-skinned charges, the child-gift motif articulated evolving models of femininity in a trans-national France,” she wrote in the grant narrative.

The NEH is an independent federal agency created as a result of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. Of the more than 1,200 applications each year, less than 7 percent of applicants receive one of the coveted grants.

“I’m deeply honored to be the inaugural holder of the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, which rightly honors the remarkable legacy of my former professor at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, Archbishop Demetrios,” said Papanikolaou, a professor of theology and the senior fellow and co-founder of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center.

“I am also deeply grateful to Mary and Michael Jaharis, who established this Chair with such grace and humility. The establishment of this Chair is an historic moment for the Orthodox Church and it will help carve out a new chapter in Orthodox-Catholic relations.”

Named for His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, the chair is the result of a $2 million gift from the Jaharis Family Foundation, which provides grants to arts, cultural, and religious institutions. The establishment of the chair marks a first for Orthodox studies nationally and ensures the discipline’s perpetuity at Fordham.

“This is the first chair in Orthodox theology at any university in the country,” said George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., professor of theology and co-founding director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center. “This chair is in many ways one of the cornerstones of the center, so its holder will always be fully integrated with the work and mission of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.”

Founded by Papanikolaou and Demacopoulos in 2007, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center is the first university-based site for Orthodox Christian Studies in the western hemisphere. Its mission is to foster intellectual inquiry and ecumenical dialogue by supporting scholarship and teaching critical to the ecclesial community, public discourse, and the promotion of Christian unity. Events include the annual Orthodoxy in America Lecture Series and the Patterson Triennial Conference in Orthodox/Catholic Relations, as well as a host of curricular, research, and outreach activities throughout the year pertaining to the study of Orthodox Christianity.

Last year, the Center received a prestigious challenge grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. The $2 million endowment that will come from both the center and NEH in a three-to-one matching grant will fund the center’s Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence program and Dissertation Completion Fellowship program.

Fordham is the only university in the United States to offer an interdisciplinary minor in Orthodox Christian studies.

In the United States, less than 1 percent of people identify as Orthodox Christians—however, with an estimated population in excess of 260 million worldwide, Orthodox Christianity represents the second largest Christian tradition in the world.

Now, a grant secured by two Fordham scholars will help bridge the gap between the U.S. population and this important segment of Christians living in some of the most significant global hot-spots.

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University has received a prestigious challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an independent federal agency and one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. This marks the first time that the federal government has provided a grant related specifically to Orthodox Christian studies.

“The NEH grant is the strongest possible endorsement that the work of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center is unique, valuable, and necessary not simply for Orthodox Christianity or Catholic-Orthodox relations, but for the humanities writ at large,” said Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., professor of theology and co-founding director of the center.

The 3-to-1 matching grant requires the center to raise $1.5 million, which will be matched by a $500,000 award from the NEH. This resulting $2 million endowment will create the center’s Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence program and Dissertation Completion Fellowship program.

The new two programs will provide a unique opportunity for scholars and doctoral students. Both programs, which will eventually fund up to four scholars and two graduate students, are open to scholarship pertaining to orthodox studies in any academic discipline.

The Scholar-in-Residence program is unprecedented for the discipline, while the Dissertation Completion Fellowship program will become one of only two nationwide.

“Years ago, when we had first started thinking about the center, we realized that we could have the greatest long-term impact by sponsoring research, books, and conferences,” said George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., associate professor of theology and co-founding director of the center. “Now we want to create a space where scholars who are studying Orthodox Christian studies can have access to the resources they need to pursue their scholarship.”

Such scholarship, Demacopoulos said, is critical for engaging regions of the world—including the Middle East, Russia, and the Balkans—where Orthodox Christianity is the dominant expression of Christianity. A deeper understanding of orthodox culture is “fundamentally necessary” for those who wish to be involved in these regions through business, foreign affairs, or otherwise, he said.

Moreover, scholarship in Orthodox Studies would help to shed light on the complex relationship between Christianity and Islam, two religions that have typically been seen as pitted against one another.

“In many of these countries, there is a very complicated intersection of religion and politics, and religion and culture that is often entangled in interreligious conflict,” he said. “One possibility that this award enables is that the research that these scholars will do could inspire new ways of thinking about global citizenry and new ways of thinking about Muslim-Christian cohabitation.”

This is the first challenge grant earned by Fordham, which was one of only five institutions nationwide this year to receive the maximum award of $500,000.

“The grant speaks volumes about the quality of scholarship produced in the Orthodox Christian Studies program,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of the University.

Founded by the two theology professors in 2007, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center is the first university-based site for Orthodox Christian Studies in the western hemisphere.

The three-to-one matching grant requires the center to raise $1.5 million, which will be matched by a $500,000 award from the NEH. This sum will create a $2 million endowment to fund to the center’s Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence program and Dissertation Completion Fellowship program.

“The NEH grant is the strongest possible endorsement that the work of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center is unique, valuable, and necessary not simply for Orthodox Christianity or Catholic-Orthodox relations, but for the humanities writ at large,” said Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., professor of theology and co-founding director of the center.

The two programs will provide a unique opportunity for scholars and doctoral students of Orthodox studies. The Scholar-in-Residence program is unprecedented for the discipline, while the Dissertation Completion Fellowship program will become one of only two nationwide.

“Years ago, when we had first started thinking about the center, we realized that we could have the greatest long-term impact by sponsoring research, books, and conferences,” said George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., associate professor of theology and co-founding director of the center. “Now we want to create a space where scholars who are studying Orthodox Christian studies can have access to the resources they need to pursue their scholarship.”

This is the first challenge grant earned by Fordham, which was one of only five institutions nationwide this year to receive the maximum award of $500,000.

“I cannot think of a finer endorsement of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center than this prestigious NEH grant. The grant speaks volumes about the quality of scholarship produced in the program,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of the University. “In this, much credit is due to George Demacopoulos and Telly Papanikolaou, who have brought tremendous energy and new scholarship to Orthodox Studies at Fordham.”

Founded by the two theology professors in 2007, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center is the first university-based site for Orthodox Christian Studies in the western hemisphere.

“This is great for our center, it’s great for the Department of Theology, and it’s great for the University,” Demacopoulos said. “It reflects Father McShane’s vision that this kind of center is truly important, and that its importance can be recognized outside of church-affiliated institutions.”

– Joanna Klimaski

John Bugg, Ph.D., assistant professor and director of placement and professional development in the department of English, is the recipient of a NEH Faculty Fellowship for research on “Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism.”

During the tenure of the fellowship, Bugg said he plans to “complete the research and writing of his study of the relationship between British literary culture and political repression in the decade after the French Revolution.”

Edward Cahill, Ph.D., assistant professor of English and acting director of the American Studies program, was awarded a NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Cahill will work on his project, “Colonial Rising: Narratives of Upward Mobility in British America,” which argues that “cultures of social and economic self-transformation in 17th- and 18th-century anglophone colonial America were defined not by coherent visions of an ‘American Dream’ but rather by diverse expressions of aspiration, ambivalence, and hostility.

“By exploring stories and discourses of wealth acquisition and class mobility in colonial New England, the mid-Atlantic, the South, and the West Indies, I seek to shed historical light on the early representational forms of ambition, adventure, risk, movement, and change—values that, in the 21st century more than ever, shape and reflect our culture’s ideological assumptions and social practices,” Cahill said.

To read about what other Fordham faculty members have been up to, check out the “People” section of Inside Fordham on the Fordham website. This section, which contains faculty awards, honors and more, is updated in every new issue of Inside Fordham.