Andrea Charise

In addition to receiving recognition for her teaching and scholarship in literature (including the 2014 John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature), Dr. Charise has almost twenty years of work experience as a medical researcher (clinical epidemiology, geriatrics). Her award-winning research is published in a wide range of peer-reviewed venues including Health Expectations, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Academic Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, Essays in Romanticism, Victorian Studies, Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and English Literary History (ELH).

Her first book, The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel was published by SUNY Press in January 2020 (hardcover; paperback by University of Regina Press). Her study investigates of the impact of the 19th-century “invention” of population on broader cultural conceptualizations of older age—not only in the historical context of the nineteenth century, but in our own aging-averse moment as well. She is editor, along with Paul Crawford and Brian Brown, of the Routledge Companion to Health Humanities (450 pages, March 2020).

Her teaching and research focus on 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; literature and medicine; critical theory; metaphorics; narrative training for health professionals; digital humanities; and interdisciplinarity. 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. As of April 1, 2017, she is also cross-appointed to the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine.