Teaching

In April 2016, UTSC’s student journal The Underground named Andrea Professor of the Year (Arts, Language, and Literature) based on nominations submitted by her students.

Teaching

Awards for Excellence

In 2019 I was delighted to receive one of three UTSC Teaching Awards awarded at the Assistant Professor level, and in 2020 I was honoured to be named recipient of the University of Toronto’s Early Career Teaching Award for “exceptional commitment to student learning, pedagogical engagement, and teaching innovation.”

I am profoundly grateful to have the chance to integrate my research interests in Health Humanities into the undergraduate classroom, especially in ways that my students find valuable. If you’re curious about the intersection of the creative arts and humanities with health studies, I hope you’ll consider taking one of my courses or signing up for Canada’s first Minor Program in Health Humanities

Courses

Current Offerings

My undergraduate teaching in the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Department of Health & Society includes my Health Humanities cluster: Introduction to Health Humanities, The Human-Animal Interface, Aging and the Arts (course blog), Toronto’s Stories of Health and Illness (course blog), and Methods in Arts-Based Health Research. All these courses are part of Canada’s first undergraduate program in Health Humanities, which I supervise at the University of Toronto Scarborough. I also teach graduate courses in the University of Toronto’s English Department, including “Aging and Older Age in the 19th-Century Novel,” “Public Health Stories: Writing Illness in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” and “Literature and Medicine: Corpus, Theory, Praxis.”

This course introduces students to human health as it is represented through literature, narrative, and the visual arts. Students will develop strong critical skills in text-centered methods of analysis (i.e., the written word, visual images) through topics including health and illness narratives, death and dying, patient-professional relationships, technoscience and the human body. (Click here for a Storify generated by the very first Introduction to Health Humanities course in Fall 2014!)

This third-year undergraduate course offers an intensive, interdisciplinary study of the human-animal relationship as represented through a range of literature, film, and other critical writings. Students will explore the theoretical underpinnings of “animality” as a critical lens through which human identity, health, and policy are conceptualized. Key topics include: animals in the human imagination, particularly in relation to health and disability; animal-human mythologies; health, ethics, and the animal.

These advanced undergraduate seminars will provide intensive study of a selected topic in and/or theoretical questions about the health humanities. Topics will vary by instructor and term but may include narrative medicine, stories of illness and healing, representations of older age and aging in literature and film, AIDS and/or cancer writing, representations of death and dying in literature and film, the role of creative arts in health.

Andrea’s Writing

Learn about what Andrea has published.

Publications