Outside the Wire: Wartime Caretakers’ Experiences Then and Now

Outside the Wire is an annual discussion series focused on wartime narratives and featuring the perspectives of veterans, artists, and scholars. 

This year’s discussion takes a look at the changing experiences of caretakers in wartime: nurses, medics, surgeons, and others. How have caretakers’ lives and work changed from the Civil War to contemporary conflicts? A panel of scholars and recent veterans will examine how changes in working conditions, military and medical developments, and social circumstances have affected what it’s like to treat America’s soldiers – and what’s changed in the ways armed forces caretakers view themselves.

Co-presented by the Writers House and Warrior Writers. 

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Our panel includes: 

Jane Schultz is Professor of English and Director of Literature at IUPUI in Indianapolis. She is the editor, most recently, of This Birth Place of Souls: The Civil War Nursing Diary of Harriet Eaton, and the author of Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America, which was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize. Dr. Schultz was a recipient of an IU New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Fellowship for her book Lead, Blood and Ink: A History of Civil War Medicine. She was also a historical consultant to the PBS miniseries Mercy Street. 

Tyler Hoffman is Professor of English and Associate Provost for Academic Programs at Rutgers University-Camden. He is the author of Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry; Teaching with the Norton Anthology of Poetry; and American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop. Articles and book chapters on a wide range of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Frances E. W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Gary Snyder, Thom Gunn, and contemporary slam poets. 

Kate Epstein (moderator) is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden. Her research focuses on the acquisition of advanced industrial weapons technology; she is particularly interested in the relationship between national security and intellectual property. Her first book, Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Harvard University Press, 2014), examines these issues through the lens of torpedo development before World War I.  At Rutgers-Camden, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in military, diplomatic, and US history, and in the philosophy of history.

Eli Wright served as a combat medic in the US Army from 2002-2008 and deployed to Ramadi, Iraq from 2003-2004. Since 2007, he has been traveling whenever and wherever possible with Warrior Writers and Combat Paper to work with fellow vets in pursuit of creative pathways for addressing war trauma. Eli is currently serving as instructor and Director of the Combat Paper NJ at Frontline Arts as well as writing and making his own visual art.

Sarah N. Mess‘s poetry and art are featured in the fourth Warrior Writers anthology. Sarah served in the U.S. Army in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 as a surgical tech. Her poetry presentations include the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, New York City Poetry Festival and others.