National Collaborative on Humanities & Ethics in Dentistry (NCHED) ~ Rockefellers, Root Canals and “Race Records”: The Toothache Blues and the Story of Dentistry Reform in Interwar Harlem

Bronwen McVeigh, PhD
September 30, 2025
11am - 12pm (MST) Zoom

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Bronwen McVeigh (she/her) joined the Spectres and Camouflage project at University College Dublin as a postdoctoral fellow in 2024. She holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from the Eastman School of Music, where her dissertation was supported by the American Association of University Women and the American Musicological Society, and an MS in Medical Humanities from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. She earned her Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance and Composition at Michigan State University, where a Presser Foundation grant funded her research on anti-fascist marching bands in interwar Italy. Alongside her academic work,she occasionally writes scores in collaboration with Chicago-based documentary filmmakers. Her current projects range from the curiously popular phenomenon of medical roleplay ASMR, the subject of an ongoing collaboration with Western University Ontario, to the intersections of song, sound, sickness, and masculinity in Philip Roth’s final novel Nemesis (article forthcoming in the Journal of Literature and Medicine, Fall 2025). Recently, she has focused on studying the blues in relation to endemic illness, dental hygiene, public health campaigns, and political fractures within and beyond African American communities in interwar America.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Analyze blues narratives alongside materials from Harlem-based public health campaigns to uncover themes of alienation and access barriers within dentistry.
2. Foster critical thinking about how artistic expressions like blues can serve as visceral records of community experience, deepening our understanding of the triumphs and failures of campaigns
aiming to improve dental hygiene among lower-income African American communities in interwar Harlem. 3. Better understand ongoing challenges in broadening healthcare access and achieving patient trust by examining understudied historical primary source materials.

DENTAL PROFESSIONALS CAN EARN 1 ADA CERP CREDIT

Please register at: https://rochester.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_w4fbd4c2SnuzBVC-xphh6g