Mary Bryson | Cancer’s Dirty Margins: A Minoritized Scholar’s Pathography

Please join the Medical Humanities Research Workshop in welcoming Prof. Mary Bryson to Stanford University! 

Taking inspiration from the notion of “dirty margins,” this talk examines the critical possibilities that emerge at the intersections of advanced cancer, minoritized identities, and public humanities scholarship. It treats biomedical knowledge as cultural and pedagogical, and pathography as research evidence and resistance within regimes of biomedical authority. Here, loss is understood not only as bodily or existential diminishment, but also as an epistemic condition: the erasure or disqualification of knowledge that does not readily conform to biomedical regimes of evidence. Methodologically, the talk juxtaposes Tactic (1959), the first widely broadcast cancer-focused educational television series, with a hauntological archive drawn from the speaker’s own 2025–2026 Stage IV lung cancer documents, asking how autobiographical writing can function as research method, cultural critique, and public health intervention.