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Candi CannEmily CramerOteroJames Wake Memorial Lecture 2024: Death, Culture, and Religion: How Different Worldviews Impact the Dying Process

FRIDAY, NOV. 8 | 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. CT

Presented by Dr. Candi Cann, associate professor of religion, Baylor University; Dr. Emily Cramer, Comm '02, associate professor of health communication, Marquette University; Dr. Wendy Peltier, professor of medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin 

Join us for the James Wake Memorial Lecture hosted by the Marquette University College of Nursing and the Institute for Palliative and End-of-Life Care. We welcome Marquette students, alumni, parents, friends, and community members who are involved in this field of study and profession to attend. 

Cultural and religious worldviews deeply impact the ways in which dying, death, and grief are understood and managed. Examining various traditions from a comparative perspective within a medical framework reveals varying and shifting cultural attitudes that are multi-layered and complex. Cann argues that one cannot simply examine religious cultures alone, as they are embedded in a larger social and cultural framework that impacts how dying is managed, how death is defined, and how different conceptions of life after death affect grief. Ultimately, both medical frameworks and religious worldviews intersect and impact one another. Following the keynote address, a reactor panel will discuss how anyone can apply this information to provide culturally appropriate care. 

Following this presentation, participants should be able to: 

  • Summarize how major cultural and religious worldviews (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism) define and understand death.
  • Describe core death-related traditions, practices, and rituals of major cultural and religious worldviews.
  • Identify best practices for interprofessional palliative care teams to provide culturally appropriate patient care. 

This memorial lecture is held biennially in memory of James Wake, chaplain and husband of Dr. Madeline Wake, former Provost of Marquette University. James’ career was devoted to helping others through social work and chaplaincy. 

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MORE ABOUT THIS SESSION:

 

Dr. Candi Cann, associate professor of religion, Baylor University

Dr. Candi Cann, associate professor of religion, teaches at Baylor University in both the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core and the religion department. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative religion from Harvard University, an M.A. in Asian religions from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, and a B.A. in Asian studies and English from St. Andrews in North Carolina. In 2023, she held a Fulbright at Han Nam University, in Daejeon, South Korea.

Dr. Cann's research focuses on death and dying, and the impact of remembering (and forgetting) in shaping how lives are recalled, remembered, and celebrated. She has published five books and numerous articles and book chapters. Her first book, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-first Century (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), centers on grief and memorialization in the contemporary world. Dying to Eat: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death and the Afterlife (University Press of Kentucky, 2017) is an edited collection on the intersection of food in death and grief. The Routledge Handbook of Death and Afterlife (Routledge, 2018) is an edited collection containing thirty chapters examining death and afterlife from around the world. Her most recent book, Death and Religion: The Basics (Routledge, 2023), examined the role of religion in death, dying and grief around the world, and argues that medical culture may be nearly as important as religious worldviews in determining how one views death and the afterlife. Finally, she has a forthcoming book with MIT press titled Augmented, which discusses the intersection of death, disability, and technology, and will be published in 2025. In addition to her writing, Dr. Cann’s work has been featured in podcasts, films, and interviews with the BBC, NPR, C-SPAN’s Book TV, Milk Street, Financial Times, Washington Post, and many others. You can find her online at www.deathscholar.com.

At Baylor, she teaches world cultures, social world, world religions, Buddhism, Christian heritage, and death and dying, and she is an advisor to Baylor’s Hawai’i Club.

When she isn’t writing or in the classroom, she can be found hanging out with her family, creating pottery, or drinking coffee and reading books. 

 

Dr. Emily Cramer, associate professor of health communication, Marquette University

Dr. Cramer, Comm '02, is a health and strategic communication scholar who studies the affordances of new media in healthcare with a focus on reducing health disparities and closing communication gaps. Emily recently returned to Marquette, her undergrad alma mater, after seven years at Howard University, where she conducted research on communication around conditions of pregnancy, such as preeclampsia, which disproportionately impact Black women. She is thrilled to be back at Marquette’s Diederich College of Communication, where she will continue to examine the interactional experiences of women and minorities in healthcare settings and help grow the college’s minor in health communication. Before entering academia, Emily spent 10 years in communications at a hospice and palliative care agency in Chicago.

 

Dr. Wendy Peltier, professor of medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin

Dr. Peltier is a professor in the Division of Geriatric and Palliative Medicine with a longstanding interest in medical education. She received her MD degree from Rush University’s Medical College and completed residency in Neurology and a Neuromuscular Fellowship at the University of Michigan. Dr. Peltier joined the faculty at the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1997. During her time there, she served as neurology residency director for a decade and was recipient of the MCW Faculty Vitality Award in 2011, which led to a focus in palliative medicine. She served as palliative care section head for eight years and was involved in bringing inpatient hospice services to Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital in partnership with Horizon Home Care and Hospice. She served on the MCW Kern Institute Faculty Pillar and as well as the editorial board of the Kern Transformational Times, a publication focused on the mission of the Kern Institute to enhance medical education through caring, character and practical wisdom. Dr. Peltier was the recipient of the MCW Leonard Tow Humanism Award in 2021, which recognizes graduating medical students and faculty members who are exemplars of humanism in the care of patients.

 


 

Bill Cullinan Ed Blumenthal Chelsea Cook Nathan Lemoine Paul Gasser

Marquette and the Science of Discovery: Research Comes Alive 

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19 | 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. CT

Presenters:

  • Dr. William E. Cullinan, PT '81, dean and professor, College of Health Sciences, director of  Integrative Neuroscience Research Center, Marquette University;
  • Dr. Edward Blumenthal, associate dean for faculty, research, and graduate studies, Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, Marquette University
  • Dr. Chelsea Cook, assistant professor, biological sciences, Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, Marquette University
  • Dr. Nathan Lemoine, assistant professor, biological sciences, Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, Marquette University 
  • Dr. Paul Gasser, associate professor, biomedical sciences, College of Health Sciences, Marquette University

Dive into groundbreaking discoveries in the departments of Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Marquette, where research and innovation are making a tangible difference in society and providing hands-on learning for students. Meet world-class scientists who are investigating bee colonies to address environmental concerns, exploring how global change is affecting the world, and advancing promising new treatments for cancer by understanding how chronic stress promotes disease. You will also hear about our strategic vision for a new Science District on Marquette’s campus to provide state-of-the-art instructional and research spaces for students and faculty in Marquette’s large and growing Biomedical and Biological Sciences programs.

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More about this session

Dr. William E. Cullinan, PT ’81, received his bachelor’s degree in physical therapy from Marquette in 1981 and earned his Doctorate in Neuroscience from the University of Virginia in 1991. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan’s Mental Health Research Institute (1991–1995) before joining the Marquette faculty in the Department of Biomedical Sciences in 1995. His research laboratory, which has received funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, focuses on brain circuits that regulate neuroendocrine responses to stress, and whose dysfunction leads to neuropsychiatric illnesses such as depression, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and others. He has authored numerous research articles and book chapters on functional neuroanatomy, stress neurobiology, neuroendocrinology, and neurophysiology in journals including Trends in Neurosciences, Brain Structure and Function, and the Journal of Neuroscience. He founded the Integrative Neuroscience Research Center at Marquette, which brings together campus neuroscientists around a biweekly seminar series and promotes collaboration across neuroscience research laboratories at Marquette.

Cullinan teaches courses in anatomy, neuroanatomy, and neuroscience to undergraduate students, to students in professional programs within the College of Health Sciences, and to dental students. He also presents a biweekly neuroscience lecture series to neurosurgical residents at the Medical College of Wisconsin where he is adjunct professor of neurosurgery and directs a unique human brain dissection and course that draws a large national audience to Marquette University each year. He was named to the International Advisory Board of Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy in 2018 and was listed by Stanford University as among the top 2% of cited scientists in the world in 2023.

Cullinan received the university’s John P. Raynor, S.J., Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence in 2002 and the John P. Raynor, S.J., Professorship in 2006. He was also instrumental in the development of Marquette’s biomedical sciences undergraduate major, which was established in 1997 and quickly grew to become the university’s largest undergraduate program. Today the program serves as academic home to over 750 students. He has served as dean of the College of Health Sciences since 2007. During his tenure as dean, the college has seen growth in undergraduate enrollment, expansion of clinical professional programs and research expenditures, the development and launching of new master’s and professional programs, the addition of new clinics, and elevated program national rankings.

Dr. Edward Blumenthal joined the Marquette University Department of Biological Sciences in 2003 after receiving his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Yale University and conducting postdoctoral research at the University of California San Diego and the University of Virginia. He is currently an associate professor of biological sciences. Blumenthal is a geneticist who uses the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to understand neurodegenerative disease. Blumenthal served as chair of the Department of Biological Sciences from 2015-2018, as co-director of the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute from 2019-2021, and since 2018 has been an associate dean of the Klingler College of Arts & Sciences. 

Dr. Chelsea Cook is currently an assistant professor in the Biological Sciences department at Marquette University and the chief science officer at HiveTech Solutions, a company that creates environmentally controlled storage for small farmers. Previously, she was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University, where she studied how individual learning behavior scales to shape collective behavior. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, she studied the social, physiological, and ecological mechanisms of collective thermoregulatory behavior in honey bees. A major part of her mission as a researcher is to make science more accessible, so she has developed courses in beekeeping and environmental biology that she teaches in prisons and addiction recovery facilities.

The Cook lab takes a holistic approach to understand social behavior. It aims to explain why and how collective behavior occurs at every level; from the collective, to individual behavior, to the physiology and genetics of the individual. Ecological context is critical for understanding social behaviors, so we also explore the environmental conditions that elicit many social behaviors, such as the need for food or a change in temperature.

Dr. Nathan Lemoine is a New Orleans native who grew up playing soccer before it was cool. Lemoine received his Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from the University of Richmond in 2006. From there, he moved to Pensacola, Fla., and worked as an hourly contractor for the EPA Office of Research and Development. In 2007, he moved to Alabama to study coral reef ecology at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. He received his Masters of Marine Science in 2010. He then moved to Miami, Fla., to begin his Ph.D. in coral reef ecology at Florida International University with Dr. Deron Burkepile (now at UCSB). Lemoine switched to terrestrial plant-insect ecology and was co-advised by Dr. John Parker of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Station in Edgewater, Md. In 2015, he received his Ph.D. and moved to Colorado State University for a USDA NIFA AFRI post-doctoral fellowship studying the impacts of drought on insect control of grassland nutrient cycling. In 2019, he began as an assistant professor at Marquette University, where he enjoys studying Wisconsin prairies, watching Tottenham Hotspur, and once a year poking dead elephants with a soil corer. Nate's research primarily focus on soil-plant-insect feedback loops and he is particularly interested in how various aspects of global change will fundamentally alter this feedback loop. Beginning in Miami, Nate has been accompanied at every stop by his loyal companion and office mate: English cocker spaniel Sasha. Her research interests include aquatic fitness, snow physics, and rodent and avian behavior.

Dr. Paul Gasser is associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in zoology and physiology from the University of Wyoming and his Ph.D. in biology from Arizona State University. From 2005 to 2007 he was a National Science Foundation International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry Wellcome Laboratories for Integrative Neuroscience and Endocrinology at the University of Bristol (United Kingdom). He joined the Marquette faculty in 2007. His research, which has been funded by NSF and the National Institutes of Health, focuses on the mechanisms by which stress hormones alter cellular function in the brain, with the goal of understanding how chronic stress contributes to the pathology of neuropsychiatric disorders, neurodegenerative disease and cancer. This work is carried out in collaboration with undergraduate and Ph.D. students and is published in journals including the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Comparative Neurology and Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In 2021, he was awarded Marquette’s Way Klingler Research Fellowship. In addition to research, Dr. Gasser teaches courses in biochemistry, cell biology, neuroscience and the neurobiology of depressive illness to undergraduate and Ph.D. students. In 2011, he received the College of Health Sciences Edward W. Carroll Award for Teaching Excellence, and in 2016 he was awarded Marquette’s Rev. John P. Raynor, S.J., Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.

 



THANK YOU TO OUR BEYOND MU SPONSOR

Wintrust Wisconsin's Bank

 


MORE VIRTUAL AND IN-PERSON OFFERINGS FROM ACROSS CAMPUS

Ignatian Advent Retreat in Daily Life 
Sunday, Dec. 1 - Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2024 

Led by Dr. Kathy Coffey-Guenther, Arts '85, Grad '88, '98, senior advancement officer for alumni spirituality, Marquette University 

VIRTUAL TOURS

 


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