Join us for a hybrid graphic medicine event with visiting scholar Dr. Chinmay Murali! Gather with us in person at Countway Library or online via Zoom to hear from Dr. Murali and ask him your questions. 

About the Book:

Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine examines women’s graphic memoirs on infertility, foregrounding the complex interrelationship between women’s life writing, infertility studies, and graphic medicine.

Through a scholarly examination of the artists’ use of visual-verbal codes of the comics medium in narrating their physical ordeals and affective challenges occasioned by infertility, the book seeks to foreground the intricacies of gender identity, embodiment, subjectivity, and illness experience. Providing long-overdue scholarly attention on the perspectives of autobiographical and comics studies, the authors examine the gendered nature of the infertility experience and the notion of motherhood as an ideological force which interpolates socio-cultural discourses, accentuating the potential of graphic medicine as a creative space for the infertile women to voice their hitherto silenced perspectives on childlessness with force and urgency.

This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to scholars and students in comics studies, the health humanities, literature, and women’s and gender studies, and will also be suitable for readers in visual studies and narrative medicine.

About the Author: 

Dr. Chinmay Murali is Assistant Professor of English at Sanatana Dharma College, Alappuzha, India. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Tiruchirappalli, India. His research interests include comics studies, health humanities, literature and medicine, and graphic medicine. His Routledge monograph Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine (2021) examines the representation of women’s involuntary childlessness in graphic narratives. His research articles on graphic medicine have appeared in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (Johns Hopkins UP), Journal of Medical Humanities (Springer), Women’s Studies (Routledge), Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge), among others.

About Graphic Medicine:

“Graphic Medicine is the intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare.” -Ian Williams, MD and Cartoonist

Graphic Medicine, or the use of comics medicine, provides opportunities for participants in healthcare to engage with the experience(s) of health in unique ways. Example areas in the field include instructional and educational comics, graphic memoirs (or pathographies), fictionalized medical encounters, comic pamphlets and posters, comics creation guides, monographs on comic studies, and more. The Graphic Medicine Collection at Countway Library aims to be a comprehensive, multipurpose resource for Harvard community members and beyond. Explore the collection in our Russell Reading Room on the second floor or online at countway.info/graphicmedicine.