Isabel is a master’s student in the program of German Studies. She earned previous MA and BA from the University of Frankfurt and Marburg. She moved to Illinois to pursue her interests in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at UIUC.

Isabel is a firm believer in the field of Medical Humanities. Her goal is to teach literature to health professional students one day as this is the means of enlightenment and empathy. As a scholar in 18th century literature, Isabel believes in poetic justice, namely the nuances and complexities of literature that can sharpen moral sensibilities and focus on empathy.

What brought her to the Medical Humanities is the thought of the discipline that makes one more humane. The humanities integrated in health professions education includes history, literature, philosophy, bioethics, comparative religion, social sciences, anthropology, psychology, postmodernism, feminism, disability studies, cultural studies, media studies and bio cultures. 

As a medical humanities scholar, Isabel believes in humanistic education that aims at forming a whole person who is compassionate, knowledgeable, and who acts in the world. Her hope is to educate the emotions as well as the intellect, to enhance compassion as well as critical thinking, and, to encourage active engagement in public and/or professional life. 

Becoming learned means becoming critical and self-critical. It means learning about the shadow side of medical progress and accomplishment. For medical humanities scholars, the focus is on medicine’s scientific and technological accomplishments, its highest moral and professional norms, but, on the other hand, on the unintended consequence of medical progress on the human exploitation often involved in producing medical knowledge, and on biopolitics and the problems inherent in medical power.

Her scholars of interest are Martha Nussbaum, Jonathan Culler, Dr. George Engel, and Eric Jonathan Cassel.