Janis Caldwell

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

A physician who practiced emergency medicine for five years before pursuing a degree in literature, Janis Caldwell works both literature and science into her teachings. Caldwell, an assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University, has recently addressed issues such as biomedical ethics and medical objectivity in her research.

While a Bunting Fellow, Caldwell plans to write the manuscript, “Romanticism and the Clinic,” in which she will compare the literary and medical writing of early nineteenth-century Britain. By examining works of imaginative literature by Mary Shelley, Thomas Carlyle, and the Brontë sisters alongside medical lectures, textbooks, and journal articles, Caldwell hopes to find the common origins of the apparently oppositional terms “romantic” and “clinical” in hermeneutic ethics.

Caldwell earned her MD from Northwestern University Medical School and her PhD in English from the University of Washington.