Andrea Charise

Biography

Andrea Charise (BASc, MA, 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 is funded by agencies including Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF), the Connaught Foundation, and Canada Council for the Arts, and is published in peer-reviewed venues including Academic Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, Advances in Health Science Education, and English Literary History (ELH). She is the author or editor of two recent academic books (including the Routledge Companion to Health Humanities, 2020), and The Aesthetics of Senescence (a finalist for the 2020 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 (www.scopelab.ca), Charise brings practiced, collaborative, internationally-recognized leadership to innovative research and public-facing knowledge translation at the intersection of arts, humanities, and health. She was the recipient of one of four University of Toronto Early Career Teaching Awards for "exceptional commitment to student learning, pedagogical engagement, and teaching innovation.” In Fall 2020 she was named Principal Investigator of the new Cluster of Scholarly Prominence, "FLOURISH: Community Engaged Arts as a Method for Social Wellness", a $528,440 grant to advance creative arts engagement as an impactful intervention for enhancing social connection and wellness across the lifecourse. Beyond academia, Charise is a studio-based ceramics artist and an end-of-life doula.

For more information on Professor Charise's research, publications, and grants, see www.andreacharise.ca.

Teaching Interests

Health Humanities; arts-based health research methods; age studies; intergenerational storytelling; community-engagement and -engaged research; digital humanities (emphasis: digital storytelling); narrative medicine; English literature; interdisciplinary research and postsecondary pedagogy.