WKU History Department - Harrison Lecture

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2024 Lowell Harrison Distinguished Lecture: “There's Nothing Religious About an Appendectomy: The Complex History of Religious Hospitals in the United States”

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Dr. Ronit Stahl, Dept. of History, University of California at Berkeley

Thursday, February 15 at 5pm, Gary Ransdell Hall (GRH) 1074

Sponsored by the WKU Department of History

Dr. Ronit Stahl will present a lecture “There's Nothing Religious About an Appendectomy: The Complex History of Religious Hospitals in the United States" for the History Department's annual Lowell Harrison Distinguished Lecture. This talk is free and open to the public. It will be held in the Gary Ransdell Hall auditorium (room 1074) on Thursday, February 15 at 5pm. 

This talk is drawn from her current book project, which explores the rise of institutional and corporate rights of conscience in health care. In her talk, Dr. Stahl will discuss a curious classification puzzle that has flummoxed judges, legislators, and ordinary Americans alike—are religious hospitals religious?—and why this matters for understanding the history of health care in the US.

Contact Dr. Katherine Lennard (katherine.lennard@wku.edu) or Dr. Alex Olson (alexander.olson@wku.edu) for more information.

 

Dr. Ronit Stahl

Dr. Stahl is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. As a historian of modern America, she examines how politics, law, and religion interact in spaces such as the military and medicine. Her first book, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America, was published by Harvard University Press in 2017. 

The Harrison Distinguished Lecture

The Harrison Lecture series was established in 1993 through the generosity of Lowell and Penny Harrison to bring leading historians to share their work and ideas with the WKU community. Professor Harrison was a longtime faculty member of the WKU Department of History and a widely respected scholar of U.S. history.