Literary Nonfiction on Health and Medicine

Lisa A. Phillips is an associate professor in the Digital Media and Journalism department at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She is the author of three books, most recently First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak (2025). Her academic research interests include first-person journalism, mental health journalism, and women in the New Journalism movement. 

Mileta Roe is Professor in Comparative Literature and Spanish at Simon’s Rock at Bard College (USA). Her research areas include literary journalism, orality and storytelling, translation and adaptation studies, and 20th and 21st-century literature and film from the Americas in Spanish, French, and English. Her current work theorizes historical and contemporary connections between medicine and nonfiction writing.

Katherine Johnson-Rogers is a graduate candidate in literature with a designated emphasis in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, Life Writing and the Medicalized Body: A Conjunctural Analysis of US Medical Practice takes a materialist approach to the lived experience of patients depicted in contemporary life-writing. In her work she emphasizes the political economy of health and the importance of a collective politics of care.  

Joanne Leow is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair at Simon Fraser University. Her publications include the monograph is CounterCartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool UP, 2024) and the critical-creative memoir Exhumations: Inside the Body of the Petrostate (Alchemy/Knopf, 2026). Her creative work and research lie at the intersections of the environmental humanities, transnational and diasporic cultural production, global Asia studies, autotheory, and decoloniality.  

Dr. Josh Roiland is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Dr. Roiland has a Ph.D. in American Studies and he teaches, researches, and writes about the history, theory, and practice of literary journalism in America.

Lena Khor is an Associate Professor of English at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Her research areas include human rights, humanitarianism, postcolonialism, and life narratives. She is the author of Human Rights Discourse in a Global Network (Routledge, 2013) and articles in Human Rights Quarterly, Peace Review, English Studies in Canada, and South Central Review. 

Isabelle Meuret is Associate Professor of English and narrative journalism at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. Her research interests are in English studies, comparative literature, literary journalism, narrative medicine, and life-writing. She is currently Vice-Rector for academic affairs, in charge of diversity and gender policies at her university. 

Merve Şen is a dual-title PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Penn State University. Her research, which engages literary, film, and visual studies with health humanities, investigates the possibility of an ethics of care that foregrounds health as a social phenomenon rather than a biopolitical tool. Focusing on the hospital as a sensory and material environment, she explores the entanglements between literary, cinematic, and medical genres. 

Sarah Brophy is Professor of English at McMaster University. She is the author of Witnessing AIDS; co-editor of Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography; and co-editor of “Postcolonial Intimacies,” a special issue of Interventions. Her research on life writing, media, and critical disability/ health studies can be found in Feminist Media Studies, Somatechnics, and ASAP/Journal. In 2024, her article "Mask Aesthetics" won the Hogan Prize for the best essay in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.