About

Kirsten Ostherr, PhD, MPH, is the Director of the Medical Humanities Program and the Director and Co-founder of the Medical Futures Lab at Rice University. She serves as the Principal Investigator for the Translational Humanities Project and is the Chair of the Department of English. She holds the title of Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English. Her leadership roles indicate a focus on integrating medical humanities with digital and translational approaches to public health and medicine, fostering interdisciplinary research and education at the intersection of humanities and medical sciences.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Computer Science
• Humanities
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Literature
• Law
• Business
• Aesthetics
• Public relations
• Engineering ethics
• Internet privacy
• History
• Environmental health
• World Wide Web
• Medical education
• Art
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology

  Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · 2026-02-26 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat culture as a variable to be measured rather than fundamental to the system's operation. Drawing on hermeneutic theory from the humanities, we argue that GenAI systems function as "context machines" that must inherently address three interpretive challenges: situatedness (meaning only emerges in context), plurality (multiple valid interpretations coexist), and ambiguity (interpretations naturally conflict). We present computational hermeneutics as an emerging framework offering an interpretive account of what GenAI systems do, and how they might do it better. We offer three principles for hermeneutic evaluation-that benchmarks should be iterative, not one-off; include people, not just machines; and measure cultural context, not just model output. This perspective offers a nascent paradigm for designing and evaluating contemporary AI systems: shifting from standardized questions about accuracy to contextual ones about meaning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Patient Participation in AI for Health Curriculum

  Journal of Participatory Medicine · 2025-09-05

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care has outpaced education of the clinical workforce on responsible use of AI in patient care. Although many policy statements advocate safe, ethical, and trustworthy AI, guidance on the use of health AI has rarely included patient perspectives. This gap leaves out a valuable source of information and guidance about what responsible AI means to patients. In this viewpoint coauthored by patients, students, and faculty, we discuss a novel approach to integrating patient perspectives in undergraduate premedical education in the United States that aims to foster an inclusive and patient-centered future of AI in health care.

  PublisherDOI

• Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating Generative AI as a Cultural Technology

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 5 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Emerging infectious disease outbreaks and real-time health communication: intermediality, uncertainty and dissent

  The British Journal for the History of Science · 2025-09-05

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article maps out the challenges of public global health communication in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by providing an overview of the shifting media of health communication from the post-Second World War era to the present. The article explores the communication of science in real-time or live media of film, television, video and digital social media during three emerging infectious-disease (EID) outbreaks to place COVID-19 health communication in historical perspective. Examination of the transition from centralized, top-down communications to distributed, many-to-many, mobile communication illuminates challenges to expertise, authority and control of health narratives and imagery. Through theories of intermediality, the article explores the central function of gaps in communication networks. The article considers three cases of crisis communications amid EIDs: the influenza outbreak of 1957, HIV/AIDS around 1990 and COVID-19 in the early 2020s, and the challenges posed by scientific uncertainty under these circumstances of live, intermedial health communication. The article concludes that 'liveness' in intermedial health communications may have an inherently destabilizing effect on scientific authority.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Medical Transmedia

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2024-04-23

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter, Kirsten Ostherr draws on arguments about the endless expansion and speciation of transmedia experiences and logics across media environments made throughout part I of this book by Maureen McHugh Yeager, Paweł Frelik, and Dilman Dila (chapters 1, 3, and 4, respectively), and extends them to an unexpected and complex arena: the medical system, with its vast archives of electronic medical records and the fraught intensities of the doctor-patient relationship.Ostherr explores the useful potential of transmedia medical rec ords and the failures of the current system.Patient medical rec ords are increasingly digitized, shared, and layered across multiple specialties and providers over the course of a patient's life, comprising a sort of multifaceted media narrative.However, the current structure of these electronic rec ords reflects a limited, flat, anachronistic data model that decontextualizes the patient's experiences, objectifies the patient, and fails to capture psychological, affective, and social aspects of wellness and illness.However, a holistic " whole patient" approach that is transparent and open to patient review and input, and which makes space for a broader range of mediated content-not just test results and providers' session notes but also videos and photos, patients' social-media posts, and more-is pos si ble, and patient advocates are already designing and pi loting such systems.Like other chapters throughout this volume, including chapters 5 and 14 by Yomi Ayeni and Zoyander Street, respectively, Ostherr's discussion considers transmedia ethics in terms of the politics of repre sen ta tion, with members of marginalized groups (in this case, patients with chronic conditions in an increasingly depersonalized health-care system) seeking to use transmedia texts to stake out more nuanced and culturally grounded repre senta tions, in the face of media paradigms that render their experiences in meager or distorted ways.Like many chapters in this collection, in settings ranging from big-budget media to education and citizen science, this chapter locates transmedia dynamics playing out in a high-stakes context and considers how critical interrogation of transmedia affordances can materially change people's experiences for the better.Sara Riggare is a Swedish engineer and medical informatics researcher who was diagnosed at age thirty-two with Parkinson's disease.She gained

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Work in Progress: Novel Curriculum for Innovations in Healthcare using Theory of Co-Production as a Conceptual Framework

  2024-02-06

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Afterlife of Data

  Literature and medicine · 2024-03-01

  editorial1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Conceptualisation and Implementation of a Competency-based Mutlidisciplinary Course for Medical Students in Neurosurgey

  Advances in Medical Education and Practice · 2024-06-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The field of medicine is quickly evolving and becoming increasingly more multidisciplinary and technologically demanding. Medical education, however, does not yet adequately reflect these developments and new challenges, which calls for a reform in the way aspiring medical professionals are taught and prepared for the workplace. The present article presents an attempt to address this shortcoming in the form of a newly conceptualized course for medical students with a focus on the current demands and trends in modern neurosurgery. Competency-based education is introduced as a conceptual framework comprising academic and operational competence as well as life-world becoming. This framework provides a sound educational foundation for future medical professionals, equipping them with the knowledge as well as skills needed to successfully navigate the medical field in the current day and age. Three competencies are identified that are central to day-to-day medical practice, namely digitalization, multidisciplinarity, and the impact of recent developments on the changing patient-practitioner relationship. These competencies are relevant for all medical disciplines, but are demonstrated here in a neurosurgical context and visualized using a real patient's case study. Students follow this sample patient's way through each step of the neurosurgical workflow, from planning to performing the procedure, and can see for themselves the importance and application of the aforementioned competencies based on this real-world example. Courses such as the one presented here may prepare medical students more adequately for their future work by combining theoretical and practical skills and critical reflection, thereby providing holistic and practical insights as well as a conceptual framework for their future careers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• "Why Patients Should Teach Medical Professionals How to Use AI in Healthcare" (Preprint)

  2024-12-11

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  <sec> <title>UNSTRUCTURED</title> Efforts to regulate AI and educate clinicians to implement ethical and trustworthy AI have rarely included patient perspectives on how and when AI should be used. This gap puts patients at risk and leaves trainees unprepared to integrate AI into patient care. We discuss the need for new approaches that integrate patient perspectives into the training of health professionals to foster an inclusive and patient-centered future of AI in healthcare. </sec>

  PublisherDOI

• The future of translational medical humanities: bridging the data/narrative divide

  Medical Humanities · 2023-12-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay argues that emerging forms of translational work in the field of medical humanities offer valuable methods for engaging with communities outside of academic settings. The first section of the essay provides a synthetic overview of definitions and critical engagements with the concept of 'translation' in the context of medical humanities, a field that, in the wake of the COVID pandemic, can serve as an exemplar for other fields of the humanities. The second section explains the 'data/narrative' divide in medicine and health to demonstrate the need for new translational methodologies that can address this nexus of concern, particularly in collaboration with constituencies outside of academic settings. The third section maps out the sites and infrastructures where digital medical humanities is poised to make significant translational interventions. The final section of the essay considers data privacy and health ecology as conceptual frameworks that are necessary for bridging the data/narrative divide. Examples are drawn from the 'Translational Humanities for Public Health' website, which aggregates projects worldwide to demonstrate these emerging methodologies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kaisu Koski

  Sheffield Hallam University

  19 shared

• Heidi Rae Cooley

  6 shared

• Jason Farman

  University of Maryland, College Park

  6 shared

• Elizabeth Losh

  William & Mary

  6 shared

• Tara McPherson

  6 shared

• Bo Reimer

  6 shared

• Patrick Vonderau

  6 shared

• Anne Balsamo

  4 shared

Labs

• Medical Futures LabPI

  Translational Humanities Project

Awards & honors

• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship