Professor Andrea Charise joined the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Interdisciplinary Center for Health & Society in 2014. Her primary research and teaching interests are in the field of Health Humanities, with a focus on aging, older age, and intergenerational relationships; and English literature, especially the novel and nineteenth-century British writing. In addition to receiving awards for her scholarship in literature, including the 2014 John Charles Polanyi Prize, Dr. Charise has almost twenty years of work experience as a medical researcher, primarily in geriatrics. 

Professor Charise’s pedagogical approach involves integrating skills traditionally associated with humanities disciplines—including close reading, oral and written communication, visual literacy, and narrative analysis—as a vital complement to conventional health knowledge, research, and learning. She is the founding program supervisor of Canada’s first undergraduate program in Health Humanities (www.scopelab.ca), and she is regularly invited to consult on Health Humanities program-building initiatives across North America. Her peer-reviewed research regularly integrates the scholarship of teaching and learning, including pedagogically-focused publications in Journal of Medical Humanities, Teaching Health Humanities (Oxford University Press) and, most recently, a qualitative study–co-authored with her students–of undergraduate student experiences in Canada’s first Health Humanities program (published open-access in Advances in Health Science Education, 2020). In 2016 she was named “Professor of the Year” (Arts, Literature, and Language) by the UTSC student journal The Underground, and in 2019 she received one of three campus-wide UTSC Teaching Awards at the Assistant Professor level.