Andrea Charise

Andrea Charise, PhD, is Associate Professor and Associate Chair-Research in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough. In addition to recognition for her work in literary studies (including the John Charles Polanyi Prize), Charise has twenty years’ work experience as a health researcher (primarily in geriatrics, the care of older people). Her award-winning research and creative activity is externally funded by agencies including SSHRC, CIHR, New Frontiers in Research Fund, and the Canada Council for the Arts. She is published in an interdisciplinary range of peer-reviewed venues including Academic Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, Advances in Health Science Education, and English Literary History. She is the author or editor of two recent books, including The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities and The Aesthetics of Senescence (a finalist for the British Society for Literature and Science’s Book Prize).  

As the founding supervisor of Canada’s first undergraduate program in Health Humanities (SCOPE: The Health Humanities Learning Lab), Charise brings practiced, collaborative, internationally-recognized leadership to innovative research and public-facing knowledge translation at the intersection of arts, health, and community wellness. An accomplished educator, in 2020 she received one of four University of Toronto Early Career Teaching Awards for “exceptional commitment to student learning, pedagogical engagement, and teaching innovation.” She is the curator of The Resemblage Project, a multi-award-winning intergenerational digital storytelling initiative, and is currently Principal Investigator of “FLOURISH: Community-Engaged Arts for Social Wellness”: an interdisciplinary, community-engaged research cluster dedicated to advancing creative arts engagement across the lifecourse. 

Publications
Recent works include: 

The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. SUNY Press, 2020. (Hardcover, 240 pp; paperback edition published January 2021). 

The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities. Co-edited with Paul Crawford and Brian Brown. Routledge (February 28, 2020) (448 pp). 

“The Manual of Disaster: Creativity, Preparedness, and Writing the Emergency Room.” With Stefan Krecsy [†graduate student]. University of Toronto Quarterly 91.1 (2022): 33-50. [Open Access]

Charise A, CN Pang,† KA Khalfan.† “What is Intergenerational Storytelling? Defining the Critical Issues for Aging Research in the Humanities.” Journal of Medical Humanities 43 (2022): 615-37. [Open Access]

Costa M,† E Kangasjarvi,† A Charise (senior/corresponding author). “Beyond Empathy: A Qualitative Exploration of Arts and Humanities in Pre-professional (Baccalaureate) Health Education.” Advances in Health Science Education 25.5 (2020): 1203-1226. [Open Access]

For an up-to-date summary of my research and recent publications, head over to my website.