Lectures on Tap - "Mental Health in Medieval Times"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

📚 Lecture: "Mental Health in the Global Middle Ages"

🎤 Speaker: Dr. Kisha G. Tracy

Join us for an illuminating evening that challenges common assumptions about the medieval world and mental health. Contrary to the popular narrative that frames medieval mental health as uniformly bleak, Dr. Kisha G. Tracy reveals a far more nuanced and human story—one shaped by culture, geography, community, and time.

In this engaging talk, Dr. Tracy will explore how people in the global Middle Ages understood and responded to mental health through communities of care, physical objects, literary texts, and medical and spiritual treatments. By examining evidence from across the medieval world, she will show how medieval approaches to mental health were complex, adaptive, and often surprisingly resonant with modern conversations about care, disability, and well-being. This talk invites us to rethink the past—and reconsider how it continues to shape our present.

Dr. Kisha G. Tracy is Professor and Chair of English Studies and Chair of the General Education Program at Fitchburg State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Connecticut and is the author of Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature (2017) and Why Study the Middle Ages? (2022). Her research focuses on medieval disability, particularly mental health, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is President of the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages, editor of the Medieval Disability Glossary, and co-founder of the Lone Medievalist.

Don’t miss this opportunity to gain a richer, more compassionate understanding of mental health in the medieval world—and its connections to our own.

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🍻🙌

Agenda

6:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.

6:55 PM – Host introduction

7:00 PM – Lecture begins

7:45 PM – Audience Q&A

8:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round

8:30 PM – Wrap up.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Felecia For The Win