Kirsten Ostherr

Ph.D., Brown University
Associate Professor of English

Office: Herring Hall 313
Phone: 713-348-4318
Email: kostherr@rice.edu

Professor Ostherr teaches film and media studies, specializing in historical health films and medical imaging technologies. Professor Ostherr is the author of Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Duke University Press, 2005). She has published articles on documentary, science fiction, and independent art films, including “’Invisible Invaders’: The Global Body in Public Health Films,” in Lester Friedman, ed., Cultural Sutures: Medicine and Media (2004); and “Contagion and the Boundaries of the Visible: The Cinema of World Health,” Camera Obscura 50, vol. 17.2 (2002).

Professor Ostherr’s forthcoming publications include: “Empathy and Objectivity: Health Education Through Corporate Publicity Films,” in David Serlin, ed., Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture; “The Body Fights Bacteria: World War II and the Instructional Effects of Non-Theatrical Medical Motion Pictures,” in Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema; “Motion Pictures in the History of Medical Education,” in Dan Streible, Devin Orgeron, and Marsha Orgeron, eds., Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film; and “Cinema as Universal Language of Health Education: Translating Science in Unhooking the Hookworm (1920),” in Nancy Anderson and Michael Dietrich, eds., The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences.

Professor Ostherr’s current book project is Medical Visions: Producing the Patient Through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies. Medical Visions proposes that the historical legacy of mid-twentieth century medical motion pictures, television programs, and imaging technologies forms the unacknowledged subtext of current models of visual pedagogy. By placing imaging and other health technologies into narrative settings and thereby linking the medical encounter with the experiences of everyday life, the vast output of educational motion pictures and television programs in the post-World War II era radically transformed both scientific and popular understandings of health and disease. The “ways of seeing” that resulted from this perceptual transformation continue to shape our expectations for the preventative and curative effects of medical media interventions. Therefore, in order to use visual media as effective educational tools, physicians and other health experts must learn to recognize the underlying interpretive paradigms that structure their “ways of seeing.” This approach requires an understanding of the linked evolution of popular and scientific media content, style, and exhibition practices as they change over time; Medical Visions will narrate and analyze this evolution. This study is based on archival research on health film and television production, as well as the promotional materials associated with imaging technologies and disseminated by their manufacturers and the hospitals that use them. By considering health imaging in the context of educational and entertainment film and television genres, this work will draw on a rich body of scholarship addressing the ethics of persuasive messages while emphasizing the role of historical knowledge in preventing the unintentional reproduction of harmful forms of representation. Many publication exist that claim to describe “How Doctors Think,” yet none exist that explain “How Doctors See,” nor “How Patients See.” Medical Visions will use film, television, and advertising to explain how medical images acquire cultural meanings, and how those meanings in turn shape patient-physician interactions.