Ryan Hart is a Pittsburgh-based writer and teacher who earned his PhD in the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, TX in 2022. He comes to his work in the medical humanities, in many ways, motivated and informed by experiences of osteosarcoma in 2010-2011 and 2013-2014 at ages nineteen and twenty-two.  The medical humanities represents an intellectual field for disciplined exploration of the full spectrum of a person’s world that exceeds the scope of scientific objectivity that is predominant in many realms of medical reasoning.    

Only a year removed from the arguably premature termination of methotrexate and cisplatin regimens, Ryan set off to study abroad for his philosophy master’s degree, at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium.  What had begun during his undergraduate studies in philosophy as an immersion of into the question of how to live with whatever finite amount of time he had remaining now took on additional meaning through his discovery of a type of philosophy called phenomenology, the study of lived experience. 

After earning his master’s degree in philosophy from KU Leuven in Belgium while studying phenomenology, he co-founded Narrative Dimensions—an organization dedicated to helping people further understand lived experiences of illness.  The organization’s primary programming is the Living Well with Illness Workshop, which is informed by a phenomenology-based design created by British philosopher Havi Carel of Bristol University.  The workshop combines storytelling, written response to questions, and artistic expression to provide a space of reflection on personal meanings of illness.