Global Medical Humanities

One-Week Intensive Course (PO1B031). The course will be given by Peter Haysom-Rodríguez (University of Leeds).

The aim of the course is to provide an introduction to the Global Medical Humanities - one of the most current interdisciplinary and comparative trends in humanistic studies. This field is related to the state of contemporary culture/society from a global perspective (healthcare access and equity; illnesses and diseases across borders; cultural representations of health and illness; sociological, ethical and cultural phenomena such as isolation, migration, youth health problems, demographic ageing etc.). During this intensive course (October 26-30/10/2026), particular attention will be paid to feminist and queer (LGBTQ+) approaches to health and cultural production. 

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Understand the fundamental characteristics of the Global Medical Humanities, as an interdisciplinary field;
• Identify and deploy some of the key research methods of the Global Medical Humanities;
• Understand the field of queer studies, and how it resonates with questions of health/illness;
• Analyse selected cultural works (e.g. case studies in cinema, literature and visual art, from English-, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking contexts).

Peter Haysom-Rodríguez is a Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. He is an expert in Portuguese-written literatures and Portuguese-spoken cultures, approaching cultural texts from inter- and transdisciplinary approaches. His key research areas are the Medical Humanities, Queer and Feminist Studies, Spatiality, Regionalisms and Regional Identities of the 20th and 21st centuries. He has written extensively on prominent Portuguese authors such as José Saramago, Aquilino Ribeiro and Ana Luísa Amaral. He is the author of Regionalisms and Resistance in the Twentieth-Century Portuguese Novel: Spatialized Ideologies (Cambridge: Legenda, 2024). His latest article is "If (and When, and How) I Should Die: On Illness and Mortality in Ana Luísa Amaral's Poetry", Portuguese Cultural Studies, 10(1), 2026, 8-35.