Marcia Day Childress, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Medical Education (Medical Humanities)
Director, Programs in Humanities
(434) 924.9581 • woolf@virginia.edu
Marcia Day Childress directs Programs in Humanities within the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities. In this role, she oversees elective courses in humanities disciplines and other educational programming in medical humanities. She also directs the Medical Center Hour, the School of Medicine's weekly public forum on medicine and society.
Professor Childress teaches medical school courses in Literature and Medicine, Cells to Society, and Social Issues in Medicine, and directs senior medical students' independent research in humanities and the arts. Together with a law professor, she leads an Interprofessional Seminar in Ethical Values and Professional Life for medical and law students. In the College of Arts and Sciences, she teaches an upper-level undergraduate course, Literature and Medicine-Narratives of Illness and Doctoring, in the Department of English.
Her research interests include narrative in medicine, reflective education and the moral formation of the physician, and uses of literature and the visual arts in medical education and preparation for professional life (including faculty development). She writes on literature and the role of narrative and the arts in medicine, ethics, medical education, and end-of-life care. Her most recent publications focus on the short plays of Samuel Beckett, the poetry of Donald Hall, teaching literature with professional students, and teaching Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway to physicians.
A charter member of the medical school's Academy of Distinguished Educators, Professor Childress received a Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching and the School of Medicine's David A. Harrison Distinguished Educator, recognizing career achievements in medical education. She was elected as a faculty member to the national medical honor societies Alpha Omega Alpha and the Gold Humanism Honor Society. Active in university service, she has been chair of the university's Faculty Senate, chair of two Senate standing committees and chair of the President's Advisory Committee on Women's Concerns. In 2009, she received UVA's Elizabeth Zintl Leadership Award, presented by the Women's Center. Within the School of Medicine, Professor Childress sits on the School of Medicine's Committee on Women, the Faculty Development Advisory Committee, the Cells to Society Steering Committee, the Medical Education Advisory Committee, the Principles of Medicine Committee, and the Cultural Competency Advisory Committee, and chairs the committee that annually selects faculty, residents, and students for humanism in medicine awards. Her national service includes consulting for the American Board of Internal Medicine, judging the Gold Foundation's annual national medical student essay contest, and reviewing for the Bellevue Literary Review and UVA's own on-line journal, Hospital Drive.
Professor Childress holds degrees in English literature (B.A. with highest honors, honors in English, and Phi Beta Kappa, Michigan State University; M.A. and Ph.D., University of Virginia, where she wrote her dissertation on Virginia Woolf).