Jehanne Gheith

Jehanne M. Gheith is both an Associate Professor and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. As a professor, her work has been mostly on Russia and mostly about issues having to do with memory, social justice, and narrative (research topics have ranged from nineteenth-century Russian women writers to interviews with survivors of the Gulag to her current project on Russian hospice). As a hospice social worker and bereavement counselor, she works with families and patients to negotiate the tricky territory of a terminal diagnosis and how to live as richly as possible with the time remaining. Currently, she is figuring out how these two careers can best work together: she teaches courses in end of life care issues at Duke, and is seeking other ways to bring lively discourse on these issues to campus (through performance, art, practitioners’ talks, and other kinds of conversations).