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SLU in Canton getting $150,000 for public health project

Posted 10/24/17

CANTON -- The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded St. Lawrence University a $150,000 grant to be used over the next two years to support its project “Wide-Angle Learning: A Humanistic Lens on …

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SLU in Canton getting $150,000 for public health project

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CANTON -- The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded St. Lawrence University a $150,000 grant to be used over the next two years to support its project “Wide-Angle Learning: A Humanistic Lens on Public Health.”

The grant will help faculty and students to explore health and healthcare issues through the arts and humanities, according to a release from the school.

Starting with the fall semester, St. Lawrence students may now choose to minor in public health. The program consists of more than 50 course options across five different academic areas.

The goal of the Mellon-funded project will be to “create even more humanities- and arts-driven programming,” SLU said.

“We know the demand is high on campus from students thinking about how they could positively influence the world by bringing together different knowledge and methods from many fields into the public health program, from the global to the local,” Karl Schonberg, dean of academic affairs, said in a news release. “We also considered those with an existing interest in health and how we might be able to leverage their interest in other health-related fields.”

The grant will provide funding for St. Lawrence faculty to develop new courses, course components, guest lectureships, art exhibits, theatrical performances, and related enrichment activities. It will promote projects on the local level, such as collaborating with neighboring colleges and nonprofit organizations, and sponsor international engagement with St. Lawrence’s international programs in Kenya and London, for example, to emphasize global public healthcare delivery, according to the release.

“I have already seen a great deal of excitement among our faculty at the tremendous potential to design courses and arts programming to explore health issues in fresh new ways, from staging health-related theatrical productions with ‘talk-backs’ attended by sociology students to using literary texts to examine the American foodscape along ethnic, racial, and economic lines,” school president William Fox said in the news release.

The grant will also fund a postdoctoral teaching fellow to teach health humanities courses and to help implement various aspects of the program in the 2018-19 academic year.