Stanford Humanities Center
Kristine Pashin is a Stanford senior whose work connects biomaterials research, ethical analysis, and visual culture. She conducts her symbolic systems honors research in the Heilshorn Biomaterials Group on neural organoid development and is completing an Honors in the Arts thesis titled “The Shape of Suffering,” a digital exhibition that explores how pain is represented across history, science, and contemporary art. Her work brings together scientific inquiry and humanities scholarship to examine how societies understand the body and the experience of suffering.
SHC Project
The Shape of Suffering: Votive Intermediaries of Pain
Advisors: Emanuele Lugli, Hank Greely, Sarah Heilshorn
What is the focus of your current research?
My work examines how humans have represented pain across cultures, time periods, and scientific traditions. I study votive objects, medical illustrations, historical devices created to visualize internal states, and contemporary artworks that speak to illness and bodily vulnerability. The project maps how pain travels between bodies and images and how these images help shape personal, clinical, and cultural understandings of suffering.
What drew you to this topic?
I have always been struck by the fact that pain is both deeply personal and difficult to communicate. Working in biomedical research taught me how science tries to measure and model the body, while studying art history showed me how artists give form to experiences that resist language. I chose this topic because pain often sits at the edge of what can be represented, and I wanted to explore the wide range of strategies humans have used to make it visible.
How are you conducting your research?
My research combines museum and special collections study, archival work, close visual analysis, and academic research in both medical history and art history. I am assembling a digital exhibition that curates historical artifacts, scientific diagrams, votive offerings, and contemporary artworks. I also interviewed clinicians, researchers, and artists to understand how they think about pain and how they express it in their respective practices.
What would people be surprised to learn about the topic you are working on?
Many of the earliest objects created to represent pain were not made as artworks but as instruments of devotion or testimony. Small terracotta limbs left in ancient temples functioned as pleas for healing and records of injury. Scientific models used in early anatomy classes often relied on expressive poses that resemble theatrical sculpture. These objects reveal how closely art, medicine, and ritual have always been connected.
In your view, why is it valuable to study this topic?
Pain shapes every part of human life, yet many people struggle to have their pain recognized or believed. Understanding how cultures visualize suffering helps us see which experiences gain legitimacy and which are overlooked. As medicine becomes more advanced and technologies alter how we think about bodies and sensation, developing richer ways of seeing and interpreting pain is important for ethical care, clinical communication, and cultural empathy.
How is your honors thesis impacting you academically and/or personally?
This project has pushed me to cross boundaries between fields and to articulate why interdisciplinary work matters. It has made me more aware of the limits of scientific vocabulary and the power of images to communicate what words cannot. Personally, it has changed how I listen to others and how I think about the responsibility of representing human experiences with care and accuracy.
How do you anticipate the fellowship will be able to support your research?
The fellowship will support the archival and curatorial research central to this project, including access to collections, digital imaging resources, and scholarly materials. It will also allow me to be part of the Hume community, where conversations about representation, interpretation, and the ethics of storytelling are active and ongoing. I am looking forward to engaging in deeper discussions about how pain becomes universalized and how images influence public understanding of suffering. Being surrounded by peers who think critically about the humanities will help refine the conceptual and ethical foundations of my exhibition.
