Pictured: Juliet McMullin, PhD
Starting in April, Juliet McMullin, PhD, will serve as director of Medical Humanities in the Department of Family Medicine. Prior to joining UCI, Dr. McMullin was professor in the Department of Anthropology, and co-director and community engagement and dissemination lead for the Center for Health Disparities Research at UC Riverside.
Her key research and teaching interests include health equity, narrative and medicine, graphic medicine, social dimensions of cancer, land-based health, and community-engaged research. McMullin’s research and program development work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. She currently serves on the editorial board for the journal Literature and Medicine, and as a co-editor for Penn State Press’s Graphic Medicine Series.
She is the author of The Healthy Ancestor: Embodied Inequality and the Revitalization of Native Hawaiian Health, and co-editor of Confronting Cancer: Metaphors, Advocacy, and Anthropology. Her work has been published in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Social Science and Medicine, and other peer-reviewed journals.
Her new projects build on her interests in health equity and social determinants that might foster obligation and compassion as a path to wellbeing for patients and health care professionals alike. Central to McMullin’s new projects is the development of spaces for equal engagement and diverse forms of expression in research and education.
Prior to joining UCI, McMullin also served as the director for the Medical and Health Humanities Designated Emphasis in the School of Medicine and in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at UC Riverside and developed the undergraduate minor in Medical and Health Humanities.