UIW Welcomes Dr. Jonathan Shay

San Antonio – On Wednesday, April 27, the University of the Incarnate Word (UIW) will welcome Dr. Jonathan Shay who will give a public lecture on the concept of moral injury in war veterans. The lecture will take place in the UIW Concert Hall beginning at 5 p.m.

Shay’s lecture is part of a three-year project, titled Trauma: Conflict and Aftermath funded by a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  This initiative for Hispanic Serving Institutions is being conducted by faculty in the UIW College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences in collaboration with the larger San Antonio community. Shay is the project’s first visiting scholar.

Shay, a former psychiatrist for the Department of Veterans' Affairs and recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, is currently an independent scholar writing and lecturing on the complex approaches needed to understand the psychological impact of war. His pioneering work on ancient Greek accounts of combat trauma has contributed greatly to the understanding and treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among combat veterans. 

This three-year project seeks to develop new interdisciplinary humanities courses and implement service-learning components in both new and existing humanities courses. Project studies will focus on psychological trauma resulting from conflict—that is, trauma resulting from deliberate, violent human interaction—in three populations: war veterans, refugees and victims of sexual violence.  Each project year will be devoted to studying one of these three groups, hosting visiting speakers, and holding a symposium at the end of the third year that will allow faculty and students to present work resulting from this project.  Year one will focus on war trauma, year two sexual violence and year three refugee trauma. The resulting course designs should serve as a model of interdisciplinary and service-oriented humanities courses for all faculty, present and future.  This, in turn, will allow students more meaningful engagement with their studies and the larger community.   

-30-

CONTACT:    Margaret Garcia, associate director communications and marketing, (210) 829-6001, mlgarci2@uiwtx.edu