Kirsten Ostherr — the Gladys Louise Fox Professor and Chair of the Department of English, and director of both Rice’s medical humanities program and the Medical Futures Lab — was invited by the U.S. Embassy in Berlin to give a lecture July 13 at the Benjamin Franklin campus of the city’s Charité hospital, one of the largest university hospitals in Europe.
The event was held to honor the 75th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. program aimed at providing aid to help Western Europe recover from the ravages of World War II. Marshall Plan funds helped establish the Charité hospital.
Ostherr’s presentation, “Medical Humanities in Times of Crisis,” was given alongside addresses from U.S. Ambassador to Germany Amy Gutmann, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci (in prerecorded remarks) and a slate of prominent German scholars and government officials.
