Formerly the Future of Healthcare Series, Vital Perspectives on Healthcare and Science engages with some of the most pressing public health issues of our time, in a regular public forum catalyzed by a book. This March event will feature Dr. Guian McKee, author of Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care.
Join the Ivy Bookshop for an evening of scholarship made accessible, opening conversation around this book, which recasts the story of the health care system by emphasizing the economic and social importance of hospitals in American communities. While hospitals have become vital economic anchors in cities across the country, the spending that supports them has constrained possibilities for comprehensive health care reform.
We’re thrilled that Alicia Puglionesi and Andrew Jewett will join Dr. McKee in conversation.
Guian McKee is a professor of presidential studies at the Miller Center. He earned a PhD in American history at the University of California, Berkeley in May 2002 and is the author Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care, published in March 2023 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, as well as The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia, published in 2008 by the University of Chicago Press. At the Miller Center, McKee is co-chair of the Presidential Recordings Program and also co-directs the Health Care Policy Project.
Alicia Puglionesi studies the history of knowledge-making and mystery in the human sciences. Her second book, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire (2022), examines four sites of resource extraction that also yielded scientific and spiritual narratives core to US settler-colonialism. Her first book is Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (2020). Other writing, scholarly and journalistic, deals with mediumship, haunting, and memory in the American landscape.
Andrew Jewett is a Teaching Professor at Johns Hopkins, where he teaches in the Medicine, Science and Humanities program, the Department of the History of Science and Technology, and the Department of History after finishing a comprehensive history of the institution. He previously taught for ten years at Harvard and three years at Boston College, and for shorter periods at Yale, NYU, Vanderbilt, Georgia College, and the University of Houston. He has also held fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He splits his time between Baltimore, Maryland and Framingham, Massachusetts.