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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. She has held a Mellon Fellowship at The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, and a Carr-Thomas-Ovenden Visiting Fellowship in English Literature at the University of Oxford. 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.  With Dr. Goyal, she published Culture and Medicine (Bloomsbury), an edited volume that collected early Synapsis essays. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Public Books, European Romantic Review, Romanticism, Partial Answers, and many other publications.  Dr. Hegele’s latest book is biography of Lord Byron (forthcoming with Princeton UP in 2027). http://www.ardenhegele.com

Social Media/Copy Editor

Holly Axford is a PhD candidate in Classics at Columbia University. Her main interests centre around the historiographic and dramatic texts of fifth-century BCE Athens, particularly the works of Herodotus and Thucydides. Her current research explores the ways in which these texts construct narratives of the past that are inflected by and engage in dialogue with their contemporary concerns. In addition, Holly is fascinated by the place of early medical writing in the literary and political cultures of the classical Greek world.

Social Media

Miel Hagler-Shorr is an undergraduate student majoring in Health and Society and participating in the Bridging Disciplines Program at the University of Texas at Austin, with academic interests spanning medicine, literature, and the medical humanities. Their work explores the intersections of healthcare, ethics, and patient experience, with particular interests in pediatric healthcare, reproductive medicine, and women’s health. Miel has also worked in healthcare access and insurance enrollment, supporting underserved patients in navigating medical coverage and resources. In addition to their interests in medicine and public health, Miel is passionate about poetry and creative writing and is the author of the anthology Somewhere Somebody’s Daughter.

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)

Rebecca M. Rosen, PhD (Murray State University)

Sarah Roth (Johns Hopkins University)

Pasquale Toscano, PhD (Vassar College)

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

Meet our Contributors-in-Residence

Writers

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.

Dr Mila Daskalova is a British Academy and LKAS Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Her first monograph,The Nineteenth-Century Asylum Periodical (Cambridge UP, 2026), explores patients’ agency and creativity by tracing the history of magazine and newspaper publishing in Victorian asylums. In 2021 she launched and co-edited Podslon, a Bulgarian art and literature magazine dedicated to mental health and illness. She teaches on the Intercalated BSc in Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow. Her current research project explores nineteenth-century psychiatrists’ engagement with literature in the development of their medical theories and practices.

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)

Trisha D. Gupta is a doctoral student in English at New York University. She studies Renaissance literature and critical theory, and her research interests are located at the dynamic nexus of embodiment, the disordered sensorium as a site of subversion, representations of refusal and self-regulation as autoimmunity, and the rhetoric of alimentary consumption in early modern literature. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in English & American Literature with minors in Medieval & Renaissance Studies and Chemistry from New York University and a Master of Arts with Distinction in Early Modern English Literature from King’s College London in collaboration with the British Library, where her master’s dissertation was entitled “Culinary Counter-Blazons: Food Metaphors and the Healing of Traumatized Female Bodies in Early Modernity.” Her book reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Seventeenth Century, and English Studies.

Caroline Hensley recently completed a PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2025) in English literary studies and medical humanities. Her doctoral project, States of Health, examines how contemporary transnational stories refute and reimagine western medical paradigms, yoking disability, illness, and healthcare experiences to anti-colonial frameworks. Dr. Hensley’s research also explores how narrative methods transform medical education and practice, which informs her current work as an instructor and scholar in the UW-Madison Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. She can be reached 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.

Esohe Irabor, PhD, is a public health professional, educator, and award-winning science communicator whose body of work spans biology, health humanities, and the arts. After securing her doctorate at Howard University, she completed the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s EMURG Health Leaders Fellowship, a stint as an Adjunct Professor of Biology at Bowie State University, and an APHL Environmental Health Fellowship at the New Jersey Department of Health. She now lives and works in Ghana as a Peace Corps Volunteer, using her talents, skills and expertise to help members of her new community live healthier lives.

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.

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.

Poornima Nair is a second year doctoral scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras. Her work focuses on the politics of public health management in Occupied Japan. Particularly, it attempts to understand how nutrition science and food became symbolic markers of a new post-war world by looking at food and food aid in Japan and India. She is currently the Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellow at the University of Tokyo. 

Kailee Parsons is a writer and researcher whose work examines tragicomic modes and the representation of male mental illness in contemporary television and stand-up comedy. Her research is grounded in gender studies, narrative studies, film theory, and critical mental health scholarship, with particular attention to lived experience. Kailee holds an MA (Honours) in English Literature from the University of St Andrews and an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. She is currently pursuing her PhD in the Medical Humanities at Durham University.

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.

Kelly Pu is a third-year medical student at the Duke University School of Medicine. She recently completed an MSc in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford, where her thesis explored spiritualism, psychical research and medical authority in interwar Britain. She is interested in how conceptions of illness and distinctions between legitimate and fraudulent healing practices are constructed, particularly by medical professionals.

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.

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.

Elizabeth Saubestre is a PhD student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the architecture and infrastructure of the nineteenth-century Mediterranean world, with particular emphasis on the spatiality of disease in Southern European port cities. Her dissertation investigates lazaretto complexes in Southern Europe and North Africa as sites of contestation and negotiation between the individual body and the biopolity of the nation through a spatial lens. Saubestre holds a MLitt in Art History from the University of St. Andrews, where she researched hobbyist photographer John Shaw Smith’s depictions of public space during the Grand Tour through a postcolonial lens.

Past Contributors-in-Residence

Mary M. Alcaro (Bryn Mawr College) ’26

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

Eleanna Bozini (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) ’26

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

Nicholas Derda ’26

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

Giulia La Cognata (University of Edinburgh) ’26

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

David Lombard (University of Leuven) ’26

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. Ajitpaul Mangat (Niagara University) ’26

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

Naomi Michalowicz (Columbia University) ’26

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

Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui (University of the Basque Country) ’26

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

Danielle Wilfand (Case Western Reserve University) ’26

Emily Wheater (University of Edinburgh) ’19

Yaming You (Duke University) ’20

Past Editorial Staff

Ankush Bhuyan, Social Media/Copy Editor (Columbia University), ’26

Bowei Li, Social Media Volunteer, ’26

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

Kit Pyne-Jaeger, Managing Editor (Columbia University), ’25-26

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