The Queen's College Record 2020

Articles
taken across different linguistic, societal and ethnic contexts, thus tackling issues of
mental illness, class, and race. A similar attention towards non-dominant languages
and cultures characterised Professor Karen Thornber’s contribution, which disclosed
the role literature in translation plays in retrieving examples of non-Anglo-Euro-
American medical practices. Karen Thornber, who is Harry Tuchman Levin Professor
in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard
University, proposed a solution to the health, environmental and racial issues gripping
our society by tracing the model of a world policy of care (see her newly-published
book Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care, published by Brill in 2020).
In the fourth episode, I spoke with Eivind Engebretsen, Professor of Interdisciplinary
Health Sciences at the Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo. Professor
Engebretsen offered the perspective of a scientist invested in humanities research
that is not secondary, but fundamental to clinical advancements. He pointed out
that medical discoveries, policy and practices are culturally determined; despite
our common perceptions, science does not provide universal truth, and this is
particularly evident in the case of face masks. The final episode was dedicated to
the transnational paths of contagion seen through the lens of twentieth-century
cinema. Kirsten Ostherr, the founder and director of the Medical Humanities Program
and the Medical Futures Lab at Rice University, Texas, drew on her expertise as a
media scholar, health researcher and technology analyst to discuss visual culture’s
paradoxical power to represent the invisibility of infection.
As emerges from this overview, Translating COVID-19 has been a profoundly
collaborative endeavour, one that proved to be both challenging and enriching. It
led me to unspecified destinations on a train I did not plan to catch, but on which
I was not alone. I would not thank the virus or months of social distancing for this
serendipitous diversion; rather, I would like to acknowledge the support of colleagues
and mentors who make academia a place of renewal and transformation, and whose
work shows us the many ways in which we, as humanists, are not just humanitarians
but also medics in the face of the unknown.
Sometimes we have no control over which train to take. Yet, we can decide how and
why to wander.
104 The Queen’s College | College Record 2020