LONG BIO (ACADEMIC)

Andrea Charise, PhD, is Associate Professor and Associate Chair-Research in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada. In addition to recognition for her scholarship 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 the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF), and the Canada Council for the Arts, totalling more than $2.5 million in research funding (as of 2022). She has 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) In 2022 she received UTSC’s Research Recognition Award for newly tenured faculty.

As the founding supervisor of Canada’s first undergraduate program in Health Humanities (scopelab.ca), 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 (resemblageproject.ca), and is Principal Investigator of “FLOURISH: Community-Engaged Arts for Social Wellness” (flourishcollective.ca): an interdisciplinary, community-engaged, SSHRC-funded research cluster dedicated to advancing creative arts engagement across the lifecourse. 

Charise is the recipient of numerous honours and awards. Selected honours include the Polanyi Prize for Literature (2014); the Digital Humanities Award (2020, “Best Public Engagement”) and AVA 2021 Award (High Commendation, “Best Visual Ethnographic Material Addressing Ageing and the Life Course”) for The Resemblage Project; the University of Toronto’s Early Career Teaching Award (2020); the UTSC Research Recognition Award (2022); and the 2022 Ceramics Award (Haliburton School of Art + Design). Charise holds a Bachelor of Arts and Science (BASc, Hons.) from McMaster University, an MA in Theory and Criticism from The University of Western Ontario, and a PhD in English (with Collaborative Program in Healthcare, Technology, Place) from the University of Toronto. Following her doctorate, she was a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow-in-Residence at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa, USA. 

Beyond academia, Charise is a studio-based ceramics artist and end-of-life doula.