Denver Lewellen
By Pat Lopes Harris, Media Relations Director
The same year the world marks the 30th anniversary of the reported case of AIDS, SJSU alumnus Denver Lewellen has been received a Fulbright Award to conduct research on the disease at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Beginning this month, Lewellen will spend nine months at Dalhousie focusing on “Understanding the Impact of Globalization on Community Health Care Services for Persons with HIV in Nova Scotia.”
Lewellen describes in the following post how his decision to pursue a PhD in medical anthropology was inspired by his work as a Spartan Daily reporter covering AIDS awareness events on campus in 1985.
“All of this progress goes back to my time at San Jose State University, where I met the best people, and I had the best teachers and mentors, many of whom I am still in touch with,” he said.
Lewellen has been a Visiting Scholar and John A. Sproul Research Fellow in the Canadian Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Read a related Spartan Daily story.
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I graduated from San Jose State University in 1987 with a double major in journalism and anthropology. As a reporter on SJSU’s Spartan Daily, I covered the university’s AIDS Awareness Week in 1985.
This week was a special event full of guest speakers and presentations from the CDC and local health departments that was designed to bring awareness and education of the disease to the SJSU community. To my knowledge, it was the first such event in any university on the West Coast – if not the nation. For my news coverage of the event I was given an award by my editors for “Outstanding Achievement.”
I had originally planned to be a foreign news correspondent – thus the double major. However, I was so affected by AIDS Awareness Week that I decided to follow a track in medical anthropology – a field that focuses on cross-cultural, interdisciplinary studies of health and medicine for the purpose of impacting health policy, health journalism and health education.
I obtained my master’s degree and then my Ph.D. in medical anthropology from the New School for Social Research in 1998. My field work for my Ph.D. was completed Montreal, Quebec, where I conducted an ethnographic study of HIV patients receiving services under Canada’s single-payer health plan, and I compared this research to my Masters’ research project, which was a needs assessment of persons with AIDS in New Jersey, conducted out of Rutgers University.
At the post doctorate-level I have been the principal investigator for studies related to Veteran’s health and the homeless mentally ill. In 2009 I moved back to California – after 22 years – to be a visiting scholar and research fellow in the Canadian Studies department at UC Berkeley, where I am working on publishing a series of articles about the Canadian health experience for persons with HIV. Last month I was informed that I have been selected as the next Fulbright Research Scholar in Society and Culture at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
I will be in a Nova Scotia for a year and my project there will mark my third decade as a researcher of health care policy issues related to HIV. The impact of this work, hopefully, will go beyond the attention of planners and providers of HIV care, but also to those interested in comparative research on health care delivery systems.
All of this progress goes back to my time at San Jose State University, where I met the best people, and I had the best teachers and mentors – many of whom I am still in touch with.