The Case of the Human Conference: April 16, 2026

The case study is a genre that traverses the humanities, social sciences, and medicine, yet its conventions, epistemologies, and politics differ dramatically across these fields. What work does the case do? What does it reveal, and what does it conceal? How might a truly multidisciplinary approach to case-making generate new knowledge about the human? These are the questions that animate the Neubauer Collegium's Case of the Human project, an ambitious research collaboration aimed not merely at translating theory across disciplinary boundaries but at co-producing knowledge that transcends them.
This conference will highlight three related elements of the project: 1) We will discuss the ongoing publication of our “Cases in Global Social Medicine” series in The Lancet; 2) We will delve into the genre of the case in medicine, the humanities, social sciences, and beyond through a series of reflective roundtables; 3) and, through a series of comics-making workshops with artists, we will graphically explore and construct selected case studies from across disciplinary boundaries.

10:00 am
Welcome and Overview

Brian Callender (University of Chicago Medicine)
Eugene Raikhel (University of Chicago)
Scott Stonington (University of Michigan)
10:30 am
Roundtable 1: The Case as Genre

Emily Yates-Doerr (Oregon State University)
W. J. T. Mitchell (University of Chicago)
Mayssa Rekhis (Independent)
Scott Stonington (University of Michigan)
Matthew Wolf-Meyer (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
2:00 pm
Roundtable 2: The Case and Social/Structural Justice

Ursula Francis (University of Chicago)
Michele Friedner (University of Chicago)
Seth Holmes (UC Berkeley)
Micere Keels (University of Chicago)
Ashish Premkumar (University of Chicago Medicine)

REGISTER FOR APRIL 16 KEYNOTE

REGISTER FOR APRIL 18 DISCUSSIONS

Paul Klee, A Woman For Gods, 1938 (detail).

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Host or Publisher Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society | University of Chicago