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The College of Pastoral Supervision And Psychotherapy In Conversation with Professor Arthur W. Frank


We are pleased to announce that Professor Arthur W. Frank will be the Keynote speaker at the at the 2008 Plenary Gathering of The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy.
Arthur W. Frank is professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, Alberta Canada. Dr. Frank received his undergraduate degree in English from Princeton University (High Honours, 1968), his M.A. in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania, and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University (1975). He has taught at the University of Calgary since 1975. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of The Hastings Center, the preeminent U.S. bioethics institute, and also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, which is the highest honor that Canadian academics can receive.


He is the author of At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), the story of his 1985 heart attack and subsequent testicular cancer. The book has been translated into four languages and won the 1996 Natalie Davis Spingarn Writer's Award from the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, Washington, D.C. A new edition was published in 2002 with a new Afterword. In 1995 he published The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (University of Chicago Press), a study of first-person accounts of illness. Both of his books have had excerpts reprinted in multiple anthologies in medical sociology, social medicine, and the meaning of illness.


His most recent book, The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live, was published by The University of Chicago Press in 2004. The review in the New England Journal of Medicine describes the book: “Frank rightly understands that communication gains its importance not in achieving a technical mastery…but in educating one to face difference, frailty, and limitation. Through a rich telling of stories and reflection on them, Frank conducts a symphony of ideas about medicine…” (Dec 30, 2004).


His recent journal publications have appeared in Qualitative Health Research, Qualitative Sociology, Health, Families, Systems & Health, health:, The Hastings Center Report, BioSocieties, and Literature and Medicine.


Dr. Frank is on the editorial boards of Body & Society, Families, Systems & Health, Qualitative Health Research, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, and International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Health and Well-being. In 2002 he became book review editor of the British journal Health. He is a corresponding editor of Literature and Medicine.


In 1998 Dr. Frank was William Evans Fellow in the Bioethics Research Programme, University of Otago, New Zealand. In July-August 1999 he was Visiting Professor at the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine, University of Sydney, Australia. In 2000 he delivered the R.A. Goodling Lectures at Duke Divinity School. His most recent invited lectures include delivering the 2007 Carl Moore Lecture at McMaster University’s Department of Family Medicine. He has given workshops on narrative analysis in Canada, Korea, South Africa, Britain, and Australia.
His national research awards include a Killam Resident Fellowship and a three-year project, funded by Social Science and Research Council of Canada, titled “Survivorship as moral choice.” He has been a participant in two working groups at The Hastings Center: “The Role of the Clinician-Patient Relationship in Cancer Care and Research” and “Surgically Shaping Children.” He is currently a collaborator on “The Experience and Resolution of Moral Distress in Pediatric Intensive Care Teams: A Canadian Perspective”, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.participant in two working groups at The Hastings Center: “The Role of the Clinician-Patient Relationship in Cancer Care and Research” and “Surgically Shaping Children.” He is currently a collaborator on “The Experience and Resolution of Moral Distress in Pediatric Intensive Care Teams: A Canadian Perspective”, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.


The 2008 Plenary of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy will be held March 31 through April 2, 2008, at the Wyndham Riverfront in North Little Rock Arkansas

For more information about the 2008 CPSP Plenary click here to visit the Pastoral Report
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