Andrea Charise
Dr. Andrea Charise is Assistant Professor of Health Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where she is the lead developer and founding supervisor of Canada’s first undergraduate Minor program in Health Humanities. Dr. Charise joins UTSC’s Health Studies Program from the University of Iowa where she was Postdoctoral Fellow-in-Residence at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Dr. Charise also holds faculty appointments in the University of Toronto’s Graduate Department of English and the Collaborative Graduate Program in Women’s Health at the Women’s College Research Institute.
In addition to receiving recognition for her teaching and scholarship in literature (including the 2014 John Charles Polanyi Prize), Dr. Charise has had a productive career as a medical researcher (clinical epidemiology, geriatrics). Her award-winning research has appeared in a wide range of peer-reviewed venues including Health Expectations, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Academic Medicine, Essays in Romanticism, Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and English Literary History (ELH).
She is the Founding Director and Principal Investigator of SCOPE: The Health Humanities Learning Lab (www.scopelab.ca), an arts- and humanities-based research and education initiative. SCOPE’s interdisciplinary team and research projects engage the skills traditionally associated with humanities disciplines—including close reading, oral and written communication, visual literacy, and narrative analysis—as a vital complement to conventional disciplinary approaches to health knowledge, research, and learning. In April 2016 she was named “Professor of the Year” (Arts, Literature, and Language) by the UTSC student journal, The Underground.
Dr. Charise is a founding Executive Committee member of the Modern Language Association’s new forum on Medical Humanities and Health Studies and serves on the International Advisory Board of the International Health Humanities Network. Visit her personal website at www.andreacharise.com or catch her on Twitter (@AndreaCharise).
Research Synopsis
Health Humanities and humanistic approaches to health studies; English literature, especially the novel and nineteenth-century British writing (the field in which she earned her PhD); old age and age studies; embodiment; critical theory; metaphorics; narrative training for health professionals; undergraduate pre-health and medical education; and interdisciplinarity.