Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts

One Health + Humanities Days: Arts + Humanities Interventions

One Health + Humanities Days

Arts + Humanities Interventions

Story by Katie Hodges-Kluck

Photography by Colby McLemore & Katie Hodges-Kluck

Equine history. Cinematic dance. Moroccan archaeology. Mental health. What do these topics have in common? They were just a few of the subjects explored during One Health + Humanities Days (OHHD), a collaborative partnership between the Denbo Center (then the UT Humanities Center) and the UT One Health Initiative (OHI). OHHD showcased the critical role that arts and humanities play in understanding and exploring sustainability and global wellbeing, including human, animal, plant, and environmental health.

The events, which took place on October 25-27, 2023, were organized by UT arts and humanities faculty and included a broad spectrum of community participants and visiting speakers. “The range of programming was especially exciting,” said Beauvais Lyons, divisional dean of arts & humanities. The program included twelve separate events ranging from public lectures to interactive exhibits; from cross-disciplinary research discussions to theater games; and from live musical performance to community roundtables.

A white man in a pink blazer and blue tie gestures in front of a screen showing a slide of a person's hands holding an ancient bone recorder. In the foreground, from behind, are the heads of people in the audience listening to him speak.
An older white man with dark-rimmed glasses stands in front of an audience in an auditorium giving a lecture
A white woman with long gray-blond hair and wearing a navy collared button-up over a black shirt stands behind a lectern giving a lecture
A social media advertisement shows the One Health + Humanities Days banner in purple and white above a black-and-white image of Jewish men and women in dishing soup in a kitchen in the 1940s. In the lower right corner is a photo of a smiling white woman with shoulder-length dark brown hair, wearing a pearl necklace and dark top.

Pulitzer Prize-finalist David Haskell and artist-doctor Eric Avery drew engaged audiences from campus and the greater Knoxville community to their public lectures. Haskell discussed how attention to the sonic richness of the world can guide human exploration, ethics, and action. Avery spoke about how his art engages with issues such as societal responses to diseases, death, and sexual health. Avery also collaborated with faculty and graduate students in the UT School of Art’s printmaking program, and some of his prints and books were featured in an exhibition in the Printmaking Showcase Gallery. UT faculty members Nancy Henry (English) and Helene Sinnreich (Religious Studies) also gave public lectures that attracted everyone from literature students to veterinarians. Their talks also drew online audiences from a dozen US states stretching from California to New York.

“Mortality as an Object of Team Research: a SPARKS Event” brought together scholars working in a variety of fields, including Classical studies, history, nursing, and psychiatry, for shared discussions of how we think about human mortality. The group continues to meet regularly to bridge traditional disciplinary divides and investigate new theoretical approaches to the subject. Similarly, “300 Years of Surgery: Marin Marais + a Musical Perspective on the Medical Humanities,” represented a collaboration between the UT College of Music, the UT Psychological Clinic, and the UT Medical Center, blending live musical performance with descriptions of historical surgical processes and mental health issues.

A white woman with short curly dark hair stands behind a lectern in front of a projection screen. Seated at tables around her is an audience viewed from the back.
A photo of two people on a stage in a music hall. On the left is a man with short gray hair, seated on a bench playing the cello. On the right is a woman with shoulder-length gray hair playing a grand piano.
A Black woman with dreadlocks is on the left, shown from behind lifting her arms skyward in celebration. To her right is a white woman with brown hair wearing a flower wreath and red shawl, smiling happily as she reaches out to the first woman.
Two college students - a young man in a dusty gray sweater and gray pants and a young woman with dark hair in a ponytail wearing a dark t-shirt and black pants stand in front of a portable TV screen, reading what is on the display.

Knoxville’s Unravelling Group, First Take Co., and Cattywampus Puppet Council united for an interactive participatory workshop exploring theater games and emotions related to climate change, while in Hodges Library passers-by could navigate a virtual exhibit by Stephen Collins-Elliott (Classics) exploring the effects of climate change in ancient Roman Morocco. UT Cinema Studies faculty, meanwhile, led an event at McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture investigating how dance, movement on screen, and sound recordings can foster awareness of the challenges of sustaining life on a wounded planet.

A roundtable session hosted by the Knox Birth Equity Alliance (KBEA) brought together local community leaders and maternal health experts and educators to share and discuss innovative ideas for addressing Black maternal health disparities in Knox County, Tennessee. And the Sense of Belonging team led by Jamal-Jared Alexander (English) held a workshop discussing ways to mitigate mental health issues often faced by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) graduate students at predominately white institutions.

Five smiling white women look down from over a stone museum balcony. Above and behind them, projected on the ceiling, is an upside-down image of a green field with a wide sky over it.
Four Black women sit smiling at a long conference table. Two of them are looking up at a fifth Black woman with orange hair who is standing behind a lectern.
A classroom has several tables full of people seated around them, looking up at a projection screen. On either side of the screen, two Black male presenters give a presentation to the audience.

Ultimately, One Health + Humanities Days bridged traditional divides such as town/gown, humanities and STEM fields, disciplinary silos, and beyond for a rich and engaging series of events that are only the beginning of fruitful conversations, cutting-edge research projects, and ongoing partnerships between its participants. OHHD also marked the successful collaboration between the Denbo Center and the UT One Health Initiative in their quest to address topics of pressing concern and interest for people across our local communities as well as throughout Tennessee. “Partnering with the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts,” said OHI Director Deb Miller, “was a perfect pairing.”

One Health + Humanities Events

  • Mortality as an Object of Team Research: a SPARKS Event
    • Faculty PI: Monica Black, Professor of History

  • “Sounds Wild + Broken: Learning From the Beginnings of Sound” Lecture + Book Signing by Pulitzer Prize Finalist David Haskell      
    • Faculty PI: Amy Elias, Denbo Center Director; Chancellor’s Professor of English

  • 300 Years of Surgery: Marin Marais + a Musical Perspective on the Medical Humanities                                    
    • Faculty PI: Nathan Fleschner. Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Music Theory & Composition, College of Music

  • Equine Health + Medicine: Historical + Literary Perspective
    • Lecture by Nancy Henry, Nancy Moore Goslee Professor of English

  • Black Maternal Health Community Think-Tank                                         
    • Faculty PI: Danielle Procope-Bell, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies

  • Climate Change, Language Change: Creating a Vocabulary of Healing Through Theatre Games
    • Faculty PI: Georgi Gardiner, Associate Professor of Philosophy

  • “Art as (my) Medicine” Lecture by Eric Avery, MD
    • Faculty PI: Beauvais Lyons, Professor, School of Art; Divisional Dean of Arts & Humanities

  • Public Health in Nazi Ghettos
    • Lecture by Helene Sinnreich, Chair, Department of Religious Studies

  • Centering the Marginalized               
    • Faculty PI: Jamal-Jared Alexander. Assistant Professor of English

  • Embodied Cinema: Affect, Dance, + Speculative Wellness                                
    • Faculty PIs: Heather Coker Hawkins, Assistant Professor, School of Art; Brittany Murray, Assistant Professor of French, Department of World Languages & Cultures

  • Environmental Change + the Decline of an Ancient City: The Case of Lixus, Northern Morocco
    • Interactive Exhibit in Hodges Library
    • Faculty PI: Stephen Collins-Elliott, Associate Professor of Classics

  • Exhibition: Prints + Books by Eric Avery, MD
    • UT Printmaking Showcase Gallery
Two white men in navy blue tops stand talking outside a concert hall
Photo of five people–a bearded white man and four women (two older, two younger) stand behind an A-frame sandwich board that reads "One Health + Humanities Days"
Two Black women sit smiling at the camera. One holds up a purple "One Health + Humanities Days" bag.
Two white women in dark clothing (one wearing a yellow scarf and glasses) talk animatedly with each other.
A photo of people in an audience sitting in rows in a lecture hall looking rapt and interested
A blond young woman in a white lace-sleeved top and a man in a red pullover, glasses, and carrying a blue bag, stop to look at swag and flyers laid out on a table

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