Thomas Foth
Associate Professor
Thomas Foth is an associate professor at the School of Nursing in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa. As a registered nurse, he has worked in different areas of the profession and taught at a nursing school in Germany before he came to Canada. His fields of interest include the history of (psychiatric) nursing, critical theory, philosophy of science, queer and crip theories, postcolonial and decolonial theories and practices, and critical accounting. He sees theoretical considerations as part of praxis that aims to change the status quo of nursing and our society in general. Nurses can play an essential part in changing the unequal and unjust conditions of neoliberal societies that systematically produce superfluous people, and need a “history of the present” to understand and criticize the role nurses and other healthcare providers have played in the settler colonial history of this country and how this history impacts nursing practice today.
Kylie Smith
Associate Professor
Kylie Smith is an Associate Professor, tenured, and the Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing and the Humanities and Associate Faculty in the Department of History at Emory. She teaches courses on the history of race in health care, critical theory, and nursing theory and philosophy in the School of Nursing and the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. Her research area is the history of psychiatry and she is the author of the multiple award winning book “Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing”. Her new book entitled “Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South” will be published by UNC Press and is supported by a grant from the National Library of Medicine (NIH). Kylie was awarded a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) in English and History and a PhD in History from the University of Wollongong in Australia. Before coming to Emory, Kylie worked in the School of Nursing at the University of Wollongong where she researched mental health nursing history and taught ethics and reflective practice. Kylie has also worked in multicultural HIV/AIDS health promotion in Sydney, Australia and studied scriptwriting at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.
Melanie Tanielian
Associate Professor
Melanie S. Tanielian is an associate professor in the History Department and the Program of Comparative and International Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her monograph The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid and World War I in the Middle East tells how the Ottoman home front grappled with total war and how political actors and ordinary people sought to mitigate starvation and sickness through relief activities. It examines the wartime famine’s reverberations throughout the community: in Beirut’s municipal institutions, in its philanthropic and religious organizations, in international agencies, and in the homes of the city’s residents. Tanielian is a historian of war and society and her research and teaching interests include the social and cultural history of WWI in the Middle East, the emergence of religious philanthropic societies and their work in times of conflict, the histories of modern humanitarianism, disease, medicine, and mental health. She is currently working on a new book preliminarily titled: Transnational Lunacy: Madness, Society, and Citizenship in a World at War, 1914-1919, as well as is co-editing a volume titled Afterlives: Remnants, Ruins, and Representations of the Armenian Genocide. Her most recent research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.