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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 the Discipline of 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.

Lilith Todd is a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, where she is studying 17th- and 18th-century British and Transatlantic literature. Broadly, her research interests include representations of maternity, households, and bodily sensations, the histories of nursing, sex work, and surrogacy, and the various flows of water, bodily fluids, and poetics. Before coming to Columbia, she received her B.A. in English (with honors) and in History from Brown University. Contact Lilith by email .

Site Designers: Lan A. Li and Matthew Cappetta

Section Editors

James Belarde (Mind, Brain and Behavior) is an MD/PhD candidate in the neurobiology program at Columbia University with a clinical interest in pediatric neurology. He began performing standup comedy in college and, since 2010, has trained at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City as a student in their Advanced Study Programs for both improv and sketch comedy. Since beginning medical school, James continues to perform in the city and has developed an interest in exploring the intersection between humor and medicine. He currently co-teaches an improv workshop for medical students, and his creative writing has been included in The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, as well as on the front of various refrigerators owned by his mom over the years. Contact James by email.

Emilie Egger, PhD, (Science, Technology and Medicine) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science at the Yale School of Public Health. She holds PhDs in public health and the history of medicine. Her research focuses on reproductive health, maternal-child health, and health policy implementation. Her book project, Diminished Citizenship: Reproductive Sovereignty in Historical Memory and Health Data in Peru, 1995-2006 focuses on how reproductive violence is built into historical archives and public health data. Contact Emilie by email. 

Phyllisa Smith Deroze, PhD, (Book Reviews) is an independent scholar in Literature, Health Humanities, and Black Feminism. After graduating from Pennsylvania State University with a doctorate in English Literature, she worked as a professor in the USA and the UAE for ten years. In 2013, she received a Fulbright to the UAE where she studied the connections between Arab feminism and Womanism. In 2021 she became the Director of Research for a diabetes research company and spends her days helping improve the lives of people with diabetes. Additionally, she is a diabetes lifestyle blogger and global patient advocate. She enjoys creative and academic writing. Her recent publications include The Daily News Blues (A flash fiction story highlighting the intersectionality of COVID-19, mental health, and disability), Laughing to Keep from Dying: Black Americans with Diabetes in Sitcoms and Comedies (An academic book chapter about the representation of Black Americans in TV and Film), and she is working on a memoir about black maternity health. Contact Phyllisa by email. 

Anna Fenton-Hathaway (Theory and Practice) earned her doctorate in English literature from Northwestern University and was one of the first graduate affiliates of Northwestern’s Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program. As a lecturer in the Chicago Field Studies program at Northwestern, she taught courses on social justice and civic engagement to undergraduate student-interns. More recently she worked with graduate students from different disciplines to explore the relationship between expertise and engagement in their respective fields. Anna has offered a “Bioethics and Speculative Fiction” seminar for medical students at the Feinberg School of Medicine for several years, and her work on dystopia will appear in the edited collection Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities (forthcoming from Bloomsbury). She has been the managing editor of the humanities journal Literature and Medicine since 2013. Contact Anna by email.

Claire Litt (History of Medicine) is a PhD Candidate in the department of history at Queen’s University, Canada. Her dissertation focusses on the Medici women’s uses of precious stones and minerals in health and beauty recipes during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. By examining women’s cosmetic and alchemical activities through the prism of a specific material, stones, this project hopes to use detailed historical research to expand scholarship’s understanding of the pluralistic practices that characterized early modern medicine and their links with contemporary theories on art and beauty. This research also aims to follow in the field’s ongoing reexamination of the types of people and activities that contributed to medicine in early modern Italy. More broadly, Claire’s research interests include the history of science and medicine in early modern Italy, material culture, and women’s history. These topics will be explored in the  seminar course she will teach in 2021on the history of healing in the Mediterranean leading up to the scientific revolution. Contact Claire by email.

Michelle Munyikwa (Race and Ethnicity) received her MD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and is a current resident in combined internal medicine & pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019, she earned her PhD in anthropology. She works at the intersection of medical and political anthropology, examining the interactions of trauma, history, and the law in practices of care in the United States. Her book project in progress, The Spatial Promise of Refuge, explores these questions in the context of Philadelphia. As a dedicated educator and mentor, she is interested in bridging the critical medical humanities and social sciences with medical education at all levels. Contact Michelle by email.

Diana Novaceanu (Arts and Creativity) is an MD and PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of Bucharest. Her dissertation focuses on the clinical imaginary represented in contemporary works of visual arts. Her research interests include the evolution of artist-physician collaborative practices, as well as use of medical imaging in contemporary artworks and their social implications on a global level. She is also a freelance curator.

Dr. Brian J. Troth (Gender, Sex, and Relationships) is a junior scholar who earned his PhD from the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University in the United States. Originally inspired by Freudian theories of trauma and Holocaust studies, Dr. Troth specializes in the representations of HIV/AIDS risk in French film and literature. His dissertation confronted traditional narratives of risk with contemporary changes in risk perception as HIV evolved from a death sentence to a preventable illness. His recent work focuses on risk and responsibility in a post-PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) world and iterations of the digital body and digital spaces in contemporary France. Contact Brian by email.

Meet our Contributors-in-Residence

Writers

Anita Annan is a second-year Socio-Cultural Anthropology student at the University of Washington. She is interested in exploring a variety of topics, including but not limited to cultural dissonance, intergenerational trauma, collective trauma, Black diaspora, racialization, migrant populations, mental illness, postcolonialism, neo-colonialism, health disparities, state-sanctioned violence, theorizing at what seems like the end of the world.

Ramathi Bandaranayake is a second year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her research interests include early twentieth century British and Russian literature; literature, science, and medicine; and literature and war.

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.

reelaviolette botts-ward, PhD, is a homegirl, an artist, and a nontraditional community curator from Philadelphia, PA. Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the REPAIR Project at UCSF, ree researches spiritual, ancestral, and somatic well-being and brings Black feminist healing arts to healthcare and medical science spaces. As founder of blackwomxnhealing, ree curates healing circles, exhibitions, courses, and publications for and by Black womxn. Her first book, mourning my inner[blackgirl]child, was published with Nomadic Press in 2021, and she has published articles, book chapters, and creative works with the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, Routledge Press, the University of Arizona Press, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, among others. She received her PhD in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, her MA in African American studies from UCLA, and her BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College. For more on ree’s work, visit blackwomxnhealing.com / @blackwomxnhealing / @dr.reelaviolette on instagram.

Sara DiCaglio is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where she teaches courses in the rhetoric of health and medicine, feminist science studies, and health humanities. In addition to a dual PhD in English and Women’s Studies from the Pennsylvania State University, she holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan. Her scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Body & Society, Feminist Theory, and Peitho. Her current book project, tentatively entitled Tracing Loss: Feminist Anatomies of Reproduction, Miscarriage, and Time, argues for a reintegration of reproductive loss into models of pregnancy in order to broaden our cultural discourse surrounding reproductive justice and maternal-fetal health. Contact Sara by email, on her website, or on Twitter.

Dr Sabina Dosani is a psychiatrist, writer and doctoral researcher at the University of East Anglia. Sabina has two MSc degrees, in Mental Health Studies and in Medical Humanities (with distinction), both from King’s College, London, where she developed strong interests in illness narratives, clinical narrative medicine, and the humanities in medical education. Sabina will submit her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia in September 2022. Her critical writing investigates accounts of obstetric ultrasound in contemporary fiction and creative non-fiction. Sabina’s ability to express complex ideas clearly and incisively, led to her being named by the BBC as one of 2022 BBC New Generation Thinkers. 

Antonio J. Ferraro holds a PhD in English from The Ohio State University and is currently Adjunct Instructor of English at Ohio Northern University. He also serves as the Outreach Coordinator for the International Society of the Study of Narrative. His research has been published in Literature and Medicine, Style, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. 

Brynn Fitzsimmons (she/her) is a third-year PhD student in English – Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Kansas. Her research interests include the rhetoric of health and medicine, activist and public rhetorics, and community writing. She also works with Independent Media Association, a citizen journalism project based in Kansas City, Missouri. Contact Brynn by email.

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)

John Gulledge is an Assistant Professor of English at Wittenberg University, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and disability studies. His current book project recovers the rhetorical and poetic method of energeia in early English drama and reveals the varied ways creative invention was patterned after encounters with disability. His most recent work can be found in the journal Inscriptions and the edited volume Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance (2023). He is also the co-founder of ‘The Puck Project’, a Shakespeare performance and ethics program for kids facing housing insecurity in Atlanta, GA. You can contact John by email or on his website.

Alison Hathaway is a nurse practitioner. Her clinical work centers around sexual & reproductive health, family planning and abortion care. She earned her BA from Hampshire College and her Masters from Yale School of Nursing. She lives in California.

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 a PhD candidate in Japanese history at Columbia University. Her research examines how gender ideologies shape the coevolution of traditional medicine and medical science, and vice versa. From the perspective of agnotology, the study of ignorance, Tianyuan’s dissertation explores responses to women’s subjective and nonspecific health symptoms over the past two centuries of Japanese history, especially how the power dynamic between biomedicine and kanpō, the Japanese adaptation of Chinese herbal medicine, affected the enacting of enigma surrounding the female body. Tianyuan has a background in international politics and public policy, too, and has previously worked as a researcher of international human rights mechanisms and politics for an LGBTI rights organization. She now volunteers as a peer advocate for the Gay Health Advocacy Project and the Women’s Health Advocacy Project at Columbia Health. Contact Tianyuan by email.

Dr. Kirk A. Johnson (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor of Justice Studies and Medical Humanities at Montclair State University. He is a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and serves as a member of the Atlantic Health Systems Bioethics Committee, former Assistant Director of the Medical Humanities program at Drew University, and fellow emeritus of The American Heart Association’s Multicultural Initiatives Leadership Fellowship Program. Dr. Johnson has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and upcoming contributions to numerous books. His recent books are “The Anti-Racism Resource Guide Volume One: Supporting Black Businesses and Economics” (Peculiar Capital, 2020) and “Medical Stigmata: Race, Medicine, and the Pursuit of Theological Liberation” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is the co-host of the “Bioethics in the Margins” podcast series. He is an ordained clergy in the United Church of Christ (UCC) where he serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the UCC’s Central Atlantic Conference, Secretary of the UCC Central Atlantic Conference’s New Jersey Association, and a member of the Summit Interfaith Council Anti-Racism Committee.

Grace Kao, Ph.D., ABPP is a pain psychologist and co-founder of the interdisciplinary chronic pain clinic at Texas Children’s Hospital and faculty clinician at Baylor College of Medicine. She spends her time supporting patients and families who are navigating the journey of chronic pain, providing instruction and consultation in the area of pain psychology, and writing about health and healing. Contact Grace by email.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020). [travisclau.com]

Melissa (Mel) Maldonado-Salcedo is a medical anthropologist, experimental ethnographer, and artist. Mel’s research examines embodied identities within community affirming rituals and the subsequent relationships with storytelling, reimaginations of citizenship, and family. She received her PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in Anthropology in 2016, with a specialization in gender and sexuality studies and queer studies. She is an associate research scholar at New York University in the department of Anthropology and an instructor at the Tandon School of Engineering in the department of Technology, Culture, and Society. Her courses explore the intersection of science and difference, popular culture, and medical ethics. Her current book project focuses on the Argentine diaspora after the economic crisis and their claims to meaning and belonging around conceptualizations of Latinidad. She is co-editor of the upcoming book Resistance and Liberation in the Voices of Mujerismos: an Eco-Constructive Reading (Lexington Books) which is slated for publication in spring 2021. Contact Mel by email or on her website. 

Sabrina Masud is an international Ph.D. candidate at the Department of English, specializing in Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism at Queen’s University. She recently completed her MA in African American Studies at Temple University as a Fulbright Scholar. Prior to her time at Temple, she also earned an MA in Applied Linguistics & ELT, in addition to holding a BA (Honors) in English from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her scholarly contributions have been featured in the Journal of Black Studies. Sabrina’s research focus on minority rights, equity, and diversity has led her to take on various roles, including International Commissioner with the Society of Graduate and Professional Students (SGPS), Inclusivity Fellow with the School of Graduate Studies and Post Doctoral Affairs (SGSPA), and a position on the Social Justice Committee with Public Service Alliance Canada (PSAC) at Queen’s University. Complementing her academic pursuits, Sabrina’s passion for creative writing led her to serve as Co-Editor-In-Chief for The Lamp, an international graduate literary journal affiliated with Queen’s Department of English.

Naomi Michalowicz is a PhD candidate at Columbia University’s English and Comparative Literature Department. Her dissertation project explores 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. Naomi holds a BA in English Literature and Classics from Tel Aviv University.

Tiffany D. Creegan Miller is an assistant professor of Spanish at Colby College. Working across Hispanic and K’ichean (Kaqchikel, K’iche’, and Tz’utujil Maya) literary and cultural traditions, she focuses on contemporary Indigenous studies and decolonial critical theory, with an emphasis on new media, orality and performance, as well as environmental and medical humanities. She is the author of The Maya Art of Speaking Writing: Remediating Indigenous Orality in the Digital Age (forthcoming Spring 2022, University of Arizona Press), and her published work has appeared in the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Hispanic Studies Review, Label Me Latina/o, and the MLA Teaching Series, among other venues. Miller has been actively doing fieldwork in the Guatemalan Highlands since 2010, and as a speaker of Kaqchikel Maya, she is an advisor for Wuqu’ Kawoq: Maya Health Alliance, a medical NGO which provides health care and promotes Indigenous language rights and literacy in Guatemala. Contact Tiffany by email.

Angelica Modabber is a PhD Candidate in the Italian and Comparative Literature departments at Columbia University. Her dissertation focuses on how 17th century developments in mathematics influenced religious architecture. More broadly, her research interests include the history of science during the Counter Reformation,  the religious politics of astronomy and natural philosophy, and religious responses to the plague in the 17th century. She is a Public Outreach Fellow at the Institute of Religion and Contemporary Public Life at Columbia.

Pauline Picot is a PhD candidate in Theater Studies at the Université Lumière Lyon 2. Her thesis is titled “Magnétisme, électricité, spiritisme : imaginaire du fluide dans le théâtre du XIX^e siècle” [Magnetism, electricity, spiritualism: on the imaginary representations of fluid in French XIX^th century theatre]. She is also a published playwright and poet. Contact Pauline by email.

Amala Poli is a literary scholar interested in exploring the intersections between medicine and literature. She is pursuing her doctoral studies in the Department of English at Western University, Ontario. She holds an MA in English Studies from the Manipal Centre for Humanities, MAHE, situated in India, with an interdisciplinary orientation to philosophy and sociology. Her research focuses on narrative as a body of evidence in examining sleep paralysis. Amala created the first qualifying exam list for Health Humanities at Western University in 2021. Her first book titled Writing the Self in Illness was released by Manipal Universal Press in 2019 and studies personal narratives that engage with notions of health and illness. Her book was reviewed by Synapsis here. Contact Amala by email (amalapoli14@gmail.com) to discuss potential collaborations in writing or thinking about issues in the health humanities.

Sara Press is a PhD candidate in English Literature and Science and Technology Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her work in postcolonial theory is grounded in a critique of Western knowledge construction and the socio-medical classifications that hierarchize bodies. Her research explores how intersecting modes of oppression limit people in their physical and rhetorical abilities, as well as how the standardization of medical bodies has been used to reinforce a Eurocentric ideal of health, for both the individual and the nation. Sara is currently on a two-year Visiting Fellowship in the History of Science department at Harvard University. Contact Sara by email.

Nitya Rajeshuni is a pediatrics resident at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania interested in palliative medicine, acute care, and global health.  She obtained her MD and MS in Epidemiology and Clinical Research from Stanford University.  She comes from an extensive performing arts background, trained formally in Indian Classical dance, classical piano, and vocal music and has participated in various musical theater, dance, choral, and a capella groups over the years.  In medical school, she was a featured vocalist in the viral parody music video “Dear Future Doctor” and since then, has contributed vocals to various projects including Sam Neher’s album Circle of Friends now on Spotify.  Since entering medicine, she has rediscovered her childhood love for writing and developed an interest in using the arts to examine the humanistic aspects of medicine. Contact Nitya by email or on Twitter.

Steven Rhue is a PhD Student in Anthropology and member of the Human Biological Anthropology Laboratory (HBAL) at the Ohio State University. With interdisciplinary training as a bio-cultural anthropologist and public health professional, Steven’s research emphasizes the interplay between humans as bio-cultural entities and their environment as well as its impact on human health and well-being. His doctoral research concerns children’s lived experiences and perceptions of household water (in)security in the Urban Amazon of Brazil. Contact Steven by email or on Twitter.

Marie Robin is pursuing a Ph.D in history at Columbia University where she studies gender, race, sexuality and military culture in the 20^th-century French Empire. Her doctoral dissertation explores the impact of military occupations on the regulation of soldiers’ sexuality and sexual behavior, particularly through the institutionalization and globalization of “sanitary” military field brothels (Bordel Militaire de Campagne) organized by the French Army for its troops during the decolonization of Indochina and the Maghreb region in the 1950s and 1960s. Prior to coming to Columbia, Marie received her BA in History and Middle-Eastern Studies from the American University of Paris (2017) and her MA in Early-Modern History from Durham University (2018).

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.

Steve Server is an MD/PhD candidate at the University of Chicago.  His PhD is in the Department of History and the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science.  He has interests in the history of medical education, the history of medicine and public health in Latin America, psychiatry, and the medical humanities. Contact Steve by email.

Heather Snay is a 5^th year PhD candidate at the University of Kansas in the department of Geography. She earned her MA from UC Santa Barbara in Global Studies. Currently, her work explores the intersection of geography and medical humanities. She is working on writing her dissertation which aims to explore the complexity of female chronic pain. In this analysis she utilizes the geographic self, a theory that conceptualizes the spatiality of the body, as a lens through which to analyze various humanistic mediums including patient narrative, visual artwork, and pathographics. Her hope for this work is that it provides new ways of thinking about female chronic pain that can be used to create new ways of teaching about pain and approaching the clinical conversation with such patients. 

Meenakshi Srihari earned her PhD in English from the University of Hyderabad in 2022. Her doctoral dissertation focused on auto/biographical representations of cancer across media, seeking to demonstrate how the illness narrative juxtaposes personal, political and theoretical stands to form an assemblage. Her research interests include graphic medicine and transmedial storyworlds. She is currently a Research Assistant with the Indian Writing in English Online project at the Department of English, the University of Hyderabad.

Laura Stamm is Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics and Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Department of Medicine at University of Rochester. She received her PhD in Film and Media Studies and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Stamm’s research interests broadly focuses on LGBTQ+ health, transgender studies, and medicine in visual culture. Her work appears in several academic journals, including Alphaville, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, Spectator, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and her book project, The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era, was published in 2022 with Oxford University Press.  

Jing Sun is a PhD candidate in modern Japanese history at University of Pennsylvania and is currently based in Tokyo as researcher at the at the Death & Life Studies and Practical Ethics Research Center, The University of Tokyo. Her current (dissertation) research focuses on the development of nutrition science and its socio-economic consequences. In her dissertation titled “Eating by Numbers: Nutrition, Health and the Political Economy of Food in Modern Japan, 1880-1945,” she explores the making of quantitative dietary standards and its impact on individual health consciousness and state food and nutrition policy making in Japan. She also looks comparatively at rationality and efficiency as goals of the application of scientific knowledge in the modern world. Her long-term research goal is to rethink our understanding of the modern experience by examining people’s dietary behaviors and preferences from socio-economic perspectives in Japan and the world. Contact Jing by email.

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.

Emily Waples is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Humanities and Director of the Center for Literature and Medicine at Hiram College, where she teaches courses on topics including illness narrative, the history of medicine, health and social justice, and narrative bioethics. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. Her academic research focuses on discourses of health and the politics of care in nineteenth-century American literature. Contact Emily by email or on Twitter.

 

 

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

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

Jordan Babando (University of British Columbia) ’19

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Chisomo Kalinga (University of Edinburgh) ’20

Dr. Roanne Kantor (Stanford University) ’19

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

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

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

Dr. Lauren Mitchell (The Doula Project) ’19

Diana Newby (Columbia University) ’19

Ittai Orr (Yale University, American Studies) ’18

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

Kaitlin Price Pontzer (Cornell University) ’19

Gita Ralleigh (Imperial College, London) ’23

David Robertson (Princeton University, History) ’18

Dr Jac Saorsa ’21

Dr. Gabi Schaffzin (York University) ’19

Dr. Calloway Scott (University of Cincinnati) ’19

Bassam Sidiki (The University of Michigan) ’20

Bojan Srbinovski (Cornell University) ’20

Lesley Thulin (UCLA) ’19

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

Brenda Tyrrell  (Miami University in Ohio) ’23

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