Aimee Mepham HI Tenth Anniversary Tribute

When I moved to Winston-Salem in 2008, I had no job and very little idea about what I even wanted to do. For a couple of years, I had a few positions in different departments at WFU and taught creative writing part-time. I never really found a professional home, though, until I began working at the Humanities Institute.

What appealed to me first about the HI’s mission was its focus on connecting scholars across disciplines and cultivating collaborations between different departments and schools at the university. One of these collaborations of which I’m most proud and which I co-chair is the institute’s Story, Health, & Healing initiative. This initiative brings together faculty, students, health care professionals, scholars, writers, and artists at Wake Forest University and the broader community to critically examine, teach, and reflect on the principles and practice of Narrative Medicine, the international, clinical, and academic movement that recognizes the vital role that story plays in health care. Since 2016, this initiative has provided a robust series of programs for the campus and community (high-profile guest speakers, interactive workshops, and symposia, just to name a few) and has made connections with national and international scholars at academic meetings and conferences. This work has felt even more poignant and necessary during our current crisis.

I am extremely lucky that the HI has fostered my career in the same spirit that it fosters the development of faculty research and teaching — creating space for conversation and allowing ideas to develop organically, rather than with a top-down agenda. The HI (with much credit given to the support of directors Mary Foskett and Dean Franco) has given me a professional path and ignited a passion for a discipline I knew very little about ten years ago. I do not want to imagine my life without it.

Aimee Mepham
Associate Director