Gretchen A. Case is Director of the Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities, an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, and an Associate Professor (adjunct) in the Department of Internal Medicine. She received a BA in Speech Communication and History and an MA in Communication Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Case's research and teaching interests are best categorized as health humanities (also called medical humanities), an interdisciplinary field that addresses the ways in which the arts and humanities intersect with the medical arts and sciences. Her scholarly projects often combine communication, performance, disability theory, cultures of medicine, oral history, and ethnography. Dr. Case also has more than ten years of experience as a public historian, specializing in histories of science and medicine.
Before joining the University of Utah faculty in 2010, Dr. Case taught undergraduate, graduate, and medical students at UNC-Chapel Hill, UC Berkeley, the UCB-UCSF Joint Medical Program, Florida State University, Northwestern University, and Duke University. At the U, she has taught in the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine and in the Department of Theatre as well as guest lecturing in other schools and colleges.
Along with Dr. Sydney Cheek-O’Donnell, Dr. Case received a Research Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a randomized controlled trial to assess the effectiveness of a rehearsal framework to improve the interpersonal communication skills of medical learners. Dr. Case has contributed significantly to projects funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the NIH-funded Utah Center for Excellence in ELSI Research.
Dr. Case performs and writes for the stage, most recently authoring a short play about retroviruses and scientific innovation as part of a 1U4U grant with Dr. Cheek-O’Donnell and Dr. Saveez Saffarian of the Dept. of Physics. This play, “Emergence,” will premiere at the 12th International Retroviral Symposium in September 2023, directed by Alexandra Harbold of the Dept. of Theatre.