Writers

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Editors

Rishi Goyal is Director of the Medical Humanities major in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, and an Attending Physician in the Emergency Department of Columbia University’s Medical Center. Dr. Goyal’s research, writing and teaching focuses on the reciprocal transformation that results when new ideas about health, disease and the body find forms of expression in fiction and memoirs. His most recent work explores the political, aesthetic, and social dimensions of the representation of physical trauma in literature. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning, Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books among other places.

Arden Hegele is Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she also teaches in the Medical Humanities major at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She received her PhD from Columbia in 2016 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities. Dr. Hegele’s book, Romantic Autopsy (Oxford UP), investigates how British Romantic literature is transformed on a formal level by the era’s medical discoveries in pathology and psychiatry. Her work has appeared in Public Books, European Romantic Review, Romanticism, Partial Answers, and many other scholarly publications. http://www.ardenhegele.com

Kit Pyne-Jaeger is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Their research focuses broadly on temporality, queer identity, and archival activity in literature and culture of the long nineteenth century, in contexts including classical translation, late Victorian poetry, shipboard periodicals, and Pre-Raphaelite art. Their writing has appeared in the New England Classical Journal, Adroit Journal, and the Harvard Advocate, and they are a copy editor for the Hugo Award-winning literary magazine Strange Horizons. They hold an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge and a BA in English and Classics from Cornell University. They can be reached for submissions and questions at mkp2144@columbia.edu.

Site Designers: Lan A. Li and Matthew Cappetta

Editorial Advisors:

James Belarde, MD/PhD (New York University)

Emilie Egger, PhD (Yale University)

Phyllisa Smith Deroze, PhD (Independent Scholar, Diabetes Advocate)

Anna Fenton-Hathaway, PhD (Northwestern University)

Claire Litt, PhD (Science History Institute)

Michelle Munyikwa, MD/PhD (University of Pennsylvania)

Diana Novaceanu, MD, PhD Candidate (University of Bucharest)

Sara V. Press, PhD (Harvard University)

Brian J. Troth,  PhD (Independent Scholar, HIV/AIDS Risk)

Meet our Contributors-in-Residence

Writers

Mary M. Alcaro is a Visiting Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College, where she teaches courses on medieval literature with a focus on gender and sexuality studies and the history of medicine. She received her PhD from Rutgers University where her dissertation “Unspeakable But Not Unspoken: The Literary Language of Plague Trauma in Middle English Texts,” considered the traumatic impact that the Black Death had upon English literature of the late fourteenth century.  She has also published several public-facing essays on Victorian England’s relationship with disease as represented in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. She may be contacted at malcaro@brynmawr.edu. 

Maud Belair is a second-year PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh whose research primarily focuses on the history of poverty and its lived experience in nineteenth-century England, Ireland, and Scotland. Her work focuses on food aid, the spaces it was offered in, and their barriers to access. Moreover, her research analyses how public perceptions of poverty were shaped alongside the popularization of slum literature, investigative journalism, and changing understandings of health, medicine, and science. Ultimately, her work aims to further understand how our responses to poverty result from of socially-constructed conceptions of labour, morality, charity, and power. In addition to being contributing writer for Synapsis, Maud is a co-convener of the University of Edinburgh’s Irish History Reading Group.

Ingrid Berg is a recovering COVID-era hospitalist now working in the field of palliative care for CHI Health in Omaha. She has also joined the faculty in the School of Medicine at Creighton University. Her scholarly interests include the development of stand-alone humanities-related continuing medical education, the relevance of the humanities in clinical work, especially in palliative care, and illness memoirs. Her support team includes her husband, her daughter, two dogs and two mares.

Eleanna Bozini is a final year PhD student in Comparative Literature in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her thesis focuses on the intersection between physical wounds and emotional trauma in literary writing, as well as the reception of literary depictions of injuries from the Iliad and Classical tragedy in Modernist and Postmodernist poetry. She is very interested in Interdisciplinary Research and the field of Medical Humanities in particular and is part of the Injury Studies Network. She holds an MSc in Comparative Literature from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in Greek Language and Literature from the University of Athens. As part of her PhD research, Eleanna was a CIVIS Junior Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in the University of Tubingen, and a Visiting Researcher at the English Department in the University of Glasgow as well as the Classics Department in the University of Edinburgh.

Nicholas Derda is an independent scholar whose research spans health humanities, LGBTQ+ studies, and visual culture. He recently completed a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where his dissertation, Visualizing Queer Care: Comics and Counterpublic Health in the Age of AIDS, analyzed how comics and graphic narratives shaped community-based responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis and reimagined queer care. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies, American Periodicals, and the US Latina and Latino Oral History Journal. He also has experience in public health and nonprofit work, and is interested in how the humanities can be used to confront health disparities.

Heather Glenny is a PhD Candidate in English Language & Literature at UChicago. Her research centers on the human body as a pedagogical object and teaching tool, with particular emphasis on medical education and medicalized bodies on display. Her dissertation examines cadavers and cadaveric bodies across media forms like film, photography, comics, literature, and museum exhibition, analyzing hermeneutic and material transformations when corpses turn into cadavers, from flesh to lesson. As a former museum and K-12 educator, Heather is enthusiastic about pedagogical innovation in all fields. She also holds an MA in Art & Museum Studies from Georgetown and BA in Art History and Education from Stanford. Connect with Heather by email. (hglenny[at]uchicago.edu)

Caroline Hensley is a PhD candidate in the English Literary Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on contemporary literatures in which experiences of disability, illness, and healthcare are contextualized within global encounters, such as medical imperialism, disease circulation, and transnational travel. Broadly, her work aims to tease out the overlaps and antagonisms between the health humanities and disability studies. As an undergraduate who simultaneously pursued a BA in English and BS in Health Studies, Caroline appreciates that both her research and her current position as a Career Advisor for UW students allow her to reflect on the value (and drawbacks) of interdisciplinary thinking. She can be contacted at cmhensley@wisc.edu.

Tianyuan Huang is an Assistant Professor at Tohoku University in Japan. Her research explores the intersection of the history of medicine, gender and women’s studies, and agnotology—the study of ignorance. Tianyuan has a background in international politics and public policy as well, and worked as a researcher of international human rights mechanisms at Tongyu, an LGBTI-rights nonprofit based in Beijing, before her time at Columbia University as a PhD student. Tianyuan’s interest in “sorting things out” applies not only to disease classifications but also to the cataloging standards of libraries, the historical hierarchization of materia medica in East Asia, and the digital organization of her hoard of research materials. Contact Tianyuan by email.

Giulia La Cognata graduated in Historical Sciences from the University of Milan in 2024. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Classics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research, Doctors Without Borders: The Professional and Social Identity of Physicians in the Greek World, explores how physicians were honoured and integrated within Greek communities, focusing on their professional and social roles. Before moving to Edinburgh, she worked in Italy as an EMT on an ambulance, an experience that deepened her interest in the relationship between medicine and society.

Molly Lindberg is a writer, editor, and educator based in Seattle, WA. She earned her PhD in French literature from Columbia University where she studied depictions of trauma in francophone Western and Central African literature. Molly is a French teacher to highly capable students, grades 5-8 at the Evergreen School in Shoreline. She writes across many disciplines and is deeply interested in the ways creative practices cross-pollinate and add richness to our lives.

David Lombard is a junior postdoctoral researcher at the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) affiliated with the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he works at the English Literature and the Cultural Studies Research Groups and is a member of the steering committee of the Leuven Center for Health Humanities. His current research project, titled “The Twenty-First-Century Schizophrenia Memoir and Graphic Memoir: A Rhetorical-Narratological and Multi-Actor Materialist Approach” (2024–27), is situated in literary and cultural studies and the health humanities and will investigate the forms, functions, and relations of the historically important genre of the schizophrenia memoir and graphic memoir in its multiple twenty-first-century contexts.

Dr. Sabrina Masud is an educator, researcher, and writer whose work explores the intersections of academic success, intercultural learning, and storytelling as a form of healing. She completed her PhD in English at Queen’s University (Kingston), where her research examined voice, vulnerability, and belonging in educational spaces. She currently serves as the Intercultural Academic Success Coordinator at Queen’s University.

Chaim McNamee (he/him, they/them) is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at Indiana University Bloomington (USA). Their dissertation project theorizes skin as a rhetorical site where biopolitical and biomedical power is exerted across bodies. Their broader research interests constellate around embodied rhetorics, crip/disability studies, and the rhetoric of health and medicine. He has completed an MA in English at Western Washington University and a BS in Microbiology from Montana State University. Their non-academic interests include cooking dinner for their wife, playing video games just for the character creator and inventory management, and pretending to know what they’re doing with their bonsai.

Naomi Michalowicz holds a PhD in English from Columbia University, where she is now teaching a Core Curriculum literature course. Her dissertation project explored the concept of intelligence, and how the tumultuous history of intelligence definitions, testing, and measurement has shaped representations of human minds in 20th-century novels. Naomi’s interests focus on the intersection of literature and cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and developmental and educational psychology, as well as the disciplinary history of those fields. She is a mother to one, wonderful, small human. 

Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat is an Assistant Professor of English at Niagara University. Dr. Mangat’s teaching and research focus on disability and race in contemporary American literature and art. His work is forthcoming or published in the edited collections, Care and Disability and Neurodiversity on Television, as well as the Journal of Popular Music Studies and Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal. He is currently at work on a book project that shows how disability life writing counters the neoliberal privatization of care within the family through the formalization of networked affiliations that socialize care; he is also the co-editor of an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies that offers a reassessment of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s concept of “narrative prosthesis.”
 
Rachel Peacock is a third year PhD candidate in the Department of History at Queen’s University. Her research interests include nineteenth-century Britain, the British monarchy, gender, mental illness, privacy, and print culture and media. Rachel’s doctoral research studies nearly 100 individuals who intruded on Queen Victoria’s privacy over the course of her reign (1837-1901), and whom we would today call “stalkers.” Her dissertation considers the ways these intrusions and the media coverage they received factored into broader debates about gender, madness, policing, and the public’s relationship with and reconceptualization of the British monarchy.
 

Dr. Pauline Picot is a fresh PhD graduate in Theater Studies. Her research lies at the crossroads of theatrical aesthetics and medical epistemology. She explores the interactions between medical discourse and artistic representations, both in the 19th century and today. She is also a published playwright and poet, and a performance artist.

Steven Rhue is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio). As a medical anthropologist and public health professional, his work acknowledges that contemporary challenges to human health and wellbeing are rarely those of biomedical ability, but often an intricate combination of socio-cultural issues and institutional barriers driven by systematic inequality and discrimination that permeate all levels of, and access to, care. Steven’s research emphasizes these lived experiences through ethnographic inquiry, and actively translates them into meaningful action and policy across academic, professional, and public spheres. His current research concerns the realities of household water (in)security, and has active projects in both Brazil and Ecuador.

Rebecca M. Rosen (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of English at Murray State University. Her book project, Postmortem Life: Anatomy, Autopsy and Testimony in Early America, considers how the voices of deceased people were extracted, interpreted, or stifled through forensic means, and how such practices formed the basis of an autoptic culture of testimonial retrieval in early America and the larger Atlantic world. This study demonstrates how postmortem practices illuminate conceptions of the deceased body as subject, object, and witness, and how such formulations contributed to the development of life writing. Contact Rebecca by email.

Sarah Roth is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research explores cancer care and history of the body in the United States and Mexico. An avid reader and writer, Sarah holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Notre Dame. She is currently a Graduate Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine. Contact Sarah by email.

Aman Roy is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on the politics of urban transformation in India, paying close attention to forms of commoning – epistemic, material and spatial, increasingly prone to technocratic appropriation. He is also interested in medicalized neo-Taylorism and its relationship to narratives of pain, injury and reparation. Aman holds an M.Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University and an M.A. in Sociology from Ambedkar University Delhi and a B.Sc.(H) Physics from St. Stephens College. Aman is currently teaching Anthropology at Hunter College, New York. Before his PhD he worked for several years on urban policy and housing activism in Delhi.

Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of the Basque Country (EHU, Spain) and member of REWEST: Research Group in Western American Literature and Culture. In 2023, she was awarded a four-year grant by the Basque Government to carry out her thesis on posthuman consciousness in contemporary American space opera. She has published a book chapter on hybrid identities in science fiction with Tirant lo Blanch and is currently co-editing the volume Unravelling Myth in the Fantastic: Theories, Tropes and Cultural Transgressions for Peter Lang (2025). Her academic interests include the literature/science intersection, posthumanism, transhumanism, cognitive narratology and science fiction poetics.

Merve Şen is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Penn State University. Her research is interested in the relationship between aesthetics and the hospital, as well as mobilities of care and medical imaging technologies through a series of contemporary literary, cinematic and artistic works. In this inquiry, the hospital is conceptualized not only as a biopolitical machine or a mere building but also, and more, as a material and sensory environment.  
 
Matthew Somerville is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Queensland’s Department of English Literature. He completed a Master’s program in English Language and Literature at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic) and a B.A. in Literature at Griffith University (Australia). His current research is focused upon cognitive narratology and the phenomenology of movement, wandering, and the inevitability of encountering an Other, which he explores across vagabond narratives and Beckett’s seminally named pseudocouple structure.
 
Jing Sun is a research fellow at the Death and Life Studies and Practical Ethics (Research Center) at the University of Tokyo. She holds master’s degrees in international politics and public policy and received her Ph.D. in history from University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the production, spread, and broad impact of scientific knowledge of food in Japan as a member of the modern world featuring cross-border movement of ideas, commodities, and people. She has published studies on topics of nutrition science and food economy in Japan. She is currently working on the first book project to revise and publish her Ph.D. dissertation titled “Eating by Numbers: Nutrition, Health, and the Political Economy of Food in Modern Japan, 1882-1952.”
 
Originally from Kettering, Ohio, Pasquale S. Toscano is an aspiring academic and writer, especially on disability, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Vox, and The Atlantic, among other publications. He was an undergraduate student at Washington and Lee University and then pursued graduate studies in English (1550-1700) and Classics at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Currently a Ph.D. student at Princeton, Pasquale specializes in early modern literature—especially Milton—and centers his research on the antagonism between heroic ambition and corporeal aberrance in the epic tradition. Other interests include the representation of unnatural bodies on the early modern stage, disability studies more broadly, and classical reception. His scholarly work, and creative nonfiction, has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly and is forthcoming in the Huntington Library Quarterly and Classical Receptions Journal. Pasquale has worn hearing aids since age two, and seven years ago, experienced a spinal cord injury which now has him walking with a cane and a brace. Contact Pasquale by email.
 
Danielle Wilfand is a third-year MD/MA in Bioethics dual degree student at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Her writing focuses on the experience of living with chronic illness, examining her experiences existing at the interface of being both a patient and a medical professional. Her research interests include narrative medicine and its applications in medical education and medical charting.
 
Katherine Yao is a second-year MD/MPH candidate at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. She graduated from Yale University in 2023, where she studied English Literature and Biochemistry/Biophysics. Her undergraduate thesis explored how George Eliot’s attentiveness to the interplay between science and human emotion allowed her to so faithfully render the lives of her characters in Middlemarch. Nowadays, Katherine enjoys thinking and writing about aging, caregiving, and spirituality in medicine. She spends her free time outside (ideally in the mountains), hanging with her cat (named Kit), and hosting big potlucks (in a tiny apartment).

Past Contributors-in-Residence

Sam Allen Wright (William Penn University) ’21

Brent Arehart (University of Cincinnati) ’20

Dr. Alicia Andrzejewski (College of William & Mary) ’19

Anita Annan (University of Washington) ’24

Dr. Livia Arndal Woods (University of Illinois at Springfield, Literature) ’17

Jordan Babando (University of British Columbia) ’19

Ramathi Bandanarayake (Columbia University) ’24

Sarah L. Berry (State University of New York—Oswego) ’20

reelaviolette botts-ward, PhD (University of California, San Francisco) ’24

Lara M. Boyle (Columbia University, Neurobiology and Behavior) ’17

Kathryn Cai (UCLA, English) ’17

Erica Cao (University of Cambridge Centre for Music and Science) ’19

John Carranza (University of Texas at Austin) ’23

Benjamin Gagnon Chainey (Université de Montréal and Nottingham Trent University, UK) ’19

Mikaela Chase (Johns Hopkins University) ’23

Jonathan C Chou (Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital) ’23

Amanda Coate (Stanford University) ’23

Julia Dauer (Saint Mary’s College) ’23

Jane Desmond (The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) ’20

Neşe Devenot (Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine) ’19

Dr. Sabina Dosani (University of East Anglia) ’24

Dr. April Edwell (Medicine) and Jennifer Edwell (Literature) (University of North Carolina) ’18

Chuka Nestor Emezue (University Of Missouri Sinclair School Of Nursing) ’19

Antonio Ferraro (Ohio Northern University) ’24

Brynn Fitzsimmons (University of Alabama) ’21

Kristina Fleuty (Anglia Ruskin University, Veterans and Families Institute) ’17

Mia Florin-Sefton (Columbia University) ’21

Josh Franklin (University of Pennsylvania) ’19

Dr. Andrew Godfrey-Meers (University of Dundee, Graphic Medicine) ’17

Liora O’Donnell Goldensher (Virginia Tech) ’19

Suvendu Ghatak (University of Florida) ’22

Darian Goldin-Stahl (Artist-in-Residence) (Concordia University, Humanities) ’18

John Gulledge (Wittenberg University) ’24

Alison Hathaway ’22 

Dr. Cynthia Harris (Massachusetts General Hospital, Pathology) ’17

Salvador Herrera (UCLA) ’19

Timothy Kent Holliday (McNeil Center for Early American Studies) ’20

Benjamin Hulett (Columbia University) ’21

Yoshiko Iwai (UNC School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, NC) ’20

Kirk A. Johnson ’23 

Dr. Chisomo Kalinga (University of Edinburgh) ’20

Dr. Roanne Kantor (Stanford University) ’19

Grace Kao, PhD, ABPP (Texas Children’s Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine) ’24

Botsa Katara (Durham University) ’19

Julia Katz (Rutgers University, History) ’17

Sanaullah Khan (Johns Hopkins) ’19

Haejoo Kim (Syracuse University) ’20

Jessica Kirwan (University of Florida) ’20

Bennett Kuhn (Musician-in-Residence) (Creative Resilience Collective, Philadelphia) ’18

Travis Chi Wing Lau (Kenyon College) ’24

Erik Larsen (University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry) ’19

Analía Lavin (Columbia University) ’23

Chia Yu Lien (Washington University in St. Louis) ’19

Victoria Lupascu (University of Montréal) ’24

Melissa (Mel) Maldonado-Salcedo (New York University, Tandon School of Engineering) ’24

Sinethemba Makanya (Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research) ’19

Dr. Madeleine Mant (University of Toronto Mississauga) ’21

Dr. Sneha Mantri (Duke University, Neurology and Narrative Medicine) ’17

Katey Mari (The University of Pennsylvania) ’21

Tiffany D. Creegan Miller (Colby College) ’24

Dr. Lauren Mitchell (The Doula Project) ’19

Angelica Modabber (Columbia University) ’24

Sasheenie Moodley ’24

Diana Newby (Columbia University) ’19

Ittai Orr (Yale University, American Studies) ’18

Robyn Peers (University of British Columbia) ’22 

Dr. Bríd Phillips (The University of Western Australia) ’19

Amala Poli (Western University) ’24

Kaitlin Price Pontzer (Cornell University) ’19

Gita Ralleigh (Imperial College, London) ’23

Nitya Rajeshuni (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania) ’20

David Robertson (Princeton University, History) ’18

Marie Robin (Columbia University) ’22

Dr. Jac Saorsa ’21

Dr. Gabi Schaffzin (York University) ’19

Dr. Calloway Scott (University of Cincinnati) ’19

Steve Server (University of Chicago) ’24

Bassam Sidiki (The University of Michigan) ’20

Heather Snay (University of Kansas) ’24

Bojan Srbinovski (Cornell University) ’20

Meenakshi Srihari (Sai University) ’22

Laura Stamm (University of Rochester) ’22

Lesley Thulin (UCLA) ’19

Dr Avril Tynan (Turku Institute of Advanced Studies) ’21

Brenda Tyrrell  (Miami University in Ohio) ’23

Emily Waples (Hiram College) ’24

Renée van der Wiel (University of Johannesburg) ’21

Emily Wheater (University of Edinburgh) ’19

Yaming You (Duke University) ’20

 

Past Editorial Staff

Dr. Danielle Drees, Assistant Editor (Boston University), ’20-21

Dr. Liz Bowen, Assistant Editor (Hastings Center), ’18-20

Dr. Lan A. Li, Guest Editor (Rice University), ’18

Naazanene Vatan, Copy Editor (University of Cambridge), ’19

Radhika Patel, Social Media/Copy Editor (Columbia University), ’20

Sourav Chatterjee, Social Media/Copy Editor (Columbia University), ’21

Kimberley Gani, Book Copy Editor (Columbia University), ’20-21

Molly Lindberg, Book Copy Editor (Columbia University), ’21

Matthew Cappetta, Social Media/Copy Editor & Site Designer (Columbia University), ’22

Louis Moffa, Social Media/Copy Editor (Columbia University), ’22-23

Zachary Desjardins-Mooney, Social Media/Copy Editor (Columbia University), ’23-24