Wajiha Rasul

English scholar turns to neuroscience to detect Alzheimer’s disease by analyzing texts

noreen.rasbach — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 17:15:03 +0000

English scholar turns to neuroscience to detect Alzheimer’s disease by analyzing texts

noreen.rasbach Thu, 08/23/2018 - 13:15

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Ian Lancashire, professor emeritus of English at U of T, collaborated with Graeme Hirst, a professor of computer science, to analyze Agatha Christie's work (photo by Wajiha Rasul)

Wajiha Rasul

Topic

City & Culture

Computer Science

English

Faculty of Arts & Science

Global

Humanities

Jackman Humanities Institute

Research & Innovation

Some people think an academic career in English means research on literature, but Ian Lancashire, professor emeritus of English, proves that it can take someone in other directions.

Lancashire, who joined the University of Toronto in 1968, started off as a bibliographer with Records of Early English Drama. He developed an interest in the digital humanities and eventually launched an online Early Modern English Dictionaries database with 200,000 word entries. In 2010, his fascination in neuroscience, stylistics and a desire to understand creativity led him to write Forgetful Muses: Reading the Author in the Text. That’s how he came to study Agatha Christie and discovered an effect that he linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

In collaboration with Graeme Hirst, a professor of computer science, he picked up on clues suggesting that the famed mystery novelist suffered from Alzheimer’s-related dementia in her final years – a conclusion that chimes with the view of some of Christie’s biographers. Lancashire and Hirst based their findings on an assessment of 14 of Christie’s novels and using a natural-language analysis system to measure the richness and size of her vocabulary, the increase of repeated words and of indefinite words.

Wajiha Rasul of the department of English spoke to Lancashire about his interest in neuroscience and his collaborative research.

How did you get involved in neuroscience research?

My love of poetry and interest in creativity led me to neuroscience. I educated myself by reading research articles. My full professor status allowed me to conduct long-term research projects. By analyzing Agatha Christie, Iris Murdoch, Ross Macdonald and others, I saw patterns that literary analysis alone could not well explain. Neuroscience provided answers, and in Forgetful Muses published a chapter on Agatha Christie.

In 2015 I published Vocabulary and Dementia in Six Novelists, which confirmed absolutely that longitudinal studies of writers can show Alzheimer’s disease cropping up where writing deteriorates. Vocabulary decreases, repeating phrases increase, and authors resort too much to empty words like ‘thing’ – because their memory of richer content words has been lost.

What led to research collaboration on “Longitudinal Detection of dementia through lexical and syntactic changes in writing: A case study of three British novelists”?

Computational linguist Graeme Hirst heard the first talk I gave about Agatha Christie’s results to a small group in the Bahen Centre in 2008 and volunteered to re-analyze my data with a natural-language processing system. I was very nervous about the entire venture. I am an English professor, untrained in neuroscience, and I did not want to publish unscientific results that could be seen as impugning the reputation of a major English author. The patterns I saw shocked me. I could not believe that longitudinal analysis had not been applied to authorship studies. Naturally, I jumped at Graeme's offer.

I needed colleagues with the qualifications I did not. We also needed help from the medical profession. Regina Jokel, a fine speech-language pathologist and Alzheimer's clinician at Baycrest [and assistant professor at U of T], advised us on the medical aspects of the research. Graeme found some funds at Google and applied himself and his graduate student Xuan Lee to the project. Our team of four worked really well.

The department of English had early on played an important role. They gave me funds to OCR a representative sample of Agatha Christie’s novels. Without the department’s support my data collection would have stalled.

How effective is longitudinal or change-based method in detection of dementia and where do you see its future?

It appears to be reliable when written data over some years is available. Of course, not many people publish novels annually. Yet the famous Nun Study shows that smaller sample sizes, such as diary entries, email, letters, tweets, and even recorded conversations, can be used. A noviciate nun was routinely invited to write a brief autobiography when she entered her order, and 40 to 50 years later that piece was compared to the nun's recent writings. Nuns who lacked linguistic density early on tended to develop Alzheimer’s disease in old age. The study was longitudinal and proved effective.

What are the next steps in using language impairment as an early-warning sign of Alzheimer's disease?

In my 2015 article I analyzed the novels of detective-fiction writer Ross Macdonald, who died with Alzheimer's disease, and found that his vocabulary declined markedly in his later novels. His case is even stronger than Christie's. However, Enid Blyton died with a dementia, yet the language of her children's fiction did not lose words and overly repeat phrases.

We clearly need broad-based studies in how the language of many individuals responds to aging and disease. The highly diverse cultures and languages of Canadians give researchers in the humanities here a good base for study. Longitudinal studies have appeared in Europe, which has a comparable population. Both tend to favour holistic approaches to research topics.

Any advice to English students on interdisciplinary research?

Look for faculty members who are interested in computer and language, take their courses, write a paper and propose developing new tests. My department and the Jackman Humanities Institute have been genuinely encouraging of research in this and other very experimental fields.

Robert McGill honoured with Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award for his innovative course on literary citizenship

noreen.rasbach — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 04:00:00 +0000

Robert McGill honoured with Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award for his innovative course on literary citizenship

noreen.rasbach Tue, 08/07/2018 - 00:00

Cutline

“The course was a leap into a whole new kind of teaching for me,” says Robert McGill. “It asked the students to engage in new modes of learning, whether presenting reports on literary organizations or interviewing people from those organizations"

Wajiha Rasul

Topic

City & Culture

English

Faculty of Arts & Science

Graduate Students

Humanities

Undergraduate Students

Subheadline

Honoured for course which charts a new direction for literary studies

Robert McGill, an associate professor in the University of Toronto's department of English, has been awarded the 2018 Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award by the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs, which recognizes excellence in innovative pedagogy and teaching practice.

“The award means a lot to me,” said McGill, who also directs the department’s creative writing master's program. “Teaching is the most important thing I do. It’s also the most energy-intensive and time-intensive.”

McGill was honoured for his literary citizenship course, which charts a new direction for literary studies.

The course – which McGill says would not have been possible without the support of his department and the Faculty of Arts & Science’s STEP Forward program – addresses students’ needs and interests, not just as literary critics, but as literary citizens who make contributions to the world through entrepreneurship, arts education, publishing, reviewing, their own creative writing and more.

“The course was a leap into a whole new kind of teaching for me,” said McGill. “It asked the students to engage in new modes of learning, whether presenting reports on literary organizations or interviewing people from those organizations.

“I really appreciated their commitment to the work and was impressed by their engagement with literary culture.”

McGill’s first novel, The Mysteries, was named one of the top five Canadian fiction books of 2004 by Quill & Quire. His second novel, Once We Had a Country, published in 2013, was named a book of the year by reviewers in the National Post and the Montreal Gazette.

He has also published short fiction in Hazlitt, The Journey Prize Anthology, Toronto Life, and literary journals including Descant, The Fiddlehead, and Grain. His nonfiction has appeared in the National Post, the Toronto Star, and The Walrus, as well as on CBC Radio One.

He is currently working on new fiction, as well as journal articles about diversity and authority in creative writing pedagogy.

The Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award – administered by the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs, a Canadian-focused association of creative writers, creative writing instructors, and creative writing programs – is named in honour of the influential Canadian novelist, poet and essayist. Called “Mr. Canadian Postmodern” by U of T University Professor Linda Hutcheon, Kroetsch is widely recognized as one of Canada’s foremost innovative writers.

U of T alumna Erin Shields’s adaptation of Paradise Lost to première at Stratford Festival

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 20:29:15 +0000

U of T alumna Erin Shields’s adaptation of Paradise Lost to première at Stratford Festival

noreen.rasbach Wed, 01/03/2018 - 15:29

Cutline

Playwright Erin Shields: "My courses at U of T became very important sources of inspiration for me" (photo by Sabrina Reeves)

Wajiha Rasul

Topic

City & Culture

Alumni

Department of English

Faculty of Arts & Science

Humanities

University of Toronto alumna Erin Shields, an award-winning playwright, will see her adaptation of Paradise Lost première at the Stratford Festival this summer.

Shields, who graduated from the department of English at U of T in 2008, is now a playwright living in Montreal. Her plays have been translated into various languages, and produced at the Shaw Festival, the Tarragon Theatre and many other theatres across Canada.

In 2011 she won the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language drama for If We Were Birds. She has also been nominated for numerous awards, including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the K.M. Hunter Artist Award, and five Dora Mavor Moore Awards. She recently won a Montreal English Theatre Award for best new text for her play, Instant.

Shields says she loves the communal experience of both making and watching plays and sees theatre as a radical antidote to our ever-increasing isolation from one another. Most of her work is a reimagining of established narratives through a contemporary lens.

Professor Paul Stevens, chair of the department of English in the Faculty of Arts & Science, who inspired Shields on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, will be joining her in a panel discussion about original sin as part of the Stratford Festival’s Forum Events.

Shields spoke to Wajiha Rasul of the department of English about her adaptation of Paradise Lost.

What made you interested in Milton’s work?

I was raised in the Anglican church and was always captivated by the stories – particularly the stories in the Old Testament. They were full of drama and action and fear and violence. I would pore over a copy of an illustrated children’s Bible, taking in the screaming sinners escaping the flood waters, a terrified Isaac with a knife pressed to his neck, King Solomon holding a naked baby by its ankle threatening to cut it in half and, of course, Eve biting into the apple with the wily serpent looking on. That first story, in particular, captivated me as a child. Was it possible that every human came from Adam and Eve? What exactly was original sin and how did it work? Could I really be blamed for something someone else had done?

In my third year studying English literature at the University of Toronto, I enrolled in a course to study John Milton through an intertextual study of Paradise Lost and scripture. My professor, Paul Stevens, is the person who really cracked open Paradise Lost for me. He approached the text with respect, but also a healthy dose of irreverent humour. His passionate, often provocative lectures, led us on a journey through the text. We did not work chronologically, but rather thematically examining the Old Testament from a Protestant perspective in an attempt to comprehend Milton’s relationship to the Bible. Stevens facilitated an in-depth investigation that linked the texts so completely, I often felt as though I was observing a dialogue between the texts, not only noting the Bible’s influence on Paradise Lost, but also the impact Milton had had on a contemporary reading of the Bible.

At the completion of that class, I knew my curiosity for both texts had only just begun.

Why Paradise Lost?

Paradise Lost stayed with me after that course. The theatrical potential beckoned to me and I made a couple of pieces, before this one, using Paradise Lost as source material. With the support of the Ontario Arts Council, I co-directed (with Lisa Pijuan-Nomura) a 13-artist, multidisciplinary interpretation of Paradise Lost. Through theatre, modern dance, puppetry, stand-up comedy, flamenco, bouffon, tabla, electronic music, storytelling and spoken word, we led 13 artists in an integrated investigation of the text. The piece was presented in a cabaret-style event at Lula Lounge in Toronto. Five years later, I wrote a one-woman show which examined the idea of original sin from a feminist perspective. Finally, I decided I was ready to take on the whole poem and proposed a contemporary, theatrical adaptation to the Stratford Festival.

What different perspective will your adaptation of Paradise Lost offer?

Adapting a classical text, as I have done many times before, is an act of interacting with an author who is no longer alive. I work to understand author’s intent and, at the same time, consider my own relationship to the material, examining the text through my own Canadian, contemporary, female lens. It is a process of negotiation between staying faithful to the author’s intent and asserting my own opinions. The choices are both big and small. Milton, for example, transformed the Garden of Eden into an English garden. I have transformed it into a Canadian wilderness, specifically the woods of Northern Ontario where I spent my summers as a child. The mighty pines, the Canadian Shield, the blueberry bushes, the cry of the loons on the lakes – this is my paradise.

Milton’s portrayal of the gender dynamics between Adam and Eve are a reflection of his time. My Adam and Eve are a reflection of mine in that I have endeavoured to create an equitable power dynamic between them, an equality which is ultimately undone by the fall and Eve’s punishment. Also, my rebellious Satan is female and she speaks to directly to our contemporary secular audience, telling this iconic story from her perspective, contextualizing it for our time.

Your adaptation of Paradise Lost will première at the Stratford Festival – what does it mean to you?

When I was 11 years old, my parents booked tickets to see The Merchant of Venice at the Stratford Festival. Before seeing the play, my father thought it would be a good idea for us to read the play together aloud. Each night, my father and I would sit in the living room and he would patiently listen to me stumble through the text. Of course I played Portia, so there were quite a number of big speeches to work my mouth around. We discussed the text as we went and little by little I came to understand what I was reading. The language was like a puzzle. I remember getting to the end of the courtroom scene and being astonished that Shylock was ordered to become a Christian. Despite what he had done, that consequence seemed completely unjust.

When we walked into the enormous festival theatre, I was blown away by the size of it. I felt so small and the stage seemed so large. As the play came to life, I was delighted to discover that I could follow along. I could laugh as Portia made fun of her suitors. I could feel Jessica’s desperation to get away from her strict father. I could feel the love between Antonio and Bassanio. When the play neared the end of the courtroom scene, I waited for Antonio to insist that Shylock become a Christian. To my surprise, that line never came. Why not? Did the actor forget his line? Or did the director agree with me that that punishment seemed too harsh? Whatever it was, I had noticed it. I had known the text so well, that I had noticed when something had been omitted. This made me feel empowered and completely in love with the theatre.

After that, we made a yearly pilgrimage to Stratford to see Shakespeare’s greatest hits. We continued to read the text aloud before we went, our cast growing to eventually include my three younger sisters. Seeing those plays was really the beginning of my love of theatre.

So yes, it is a big deal. It is a huge deal that one of my plays will première at the Stratford Festival.

How helpful was your degree in English in pursuing your dream career?

My English degree was my second degree. I trained as an actor at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama (now the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance) in London, England, from 1996-1999. For the next few years after I graduated, I worked as an actor in Toronto and quickly discovered that in order to be consistently working, I had to make opportunities for myself. That’s how I started playwriting. While I’d loved my practical acting training, I felt I had missed the opportunity to read. To spend time with language and literature and intelligent professors who had spent a considerable amount of time thinking about language and literature. That’s why I decided to do a second degree in English literature. And I completed three years of that degree (I bypassed my first year because of my other degree) in five years.

Throughout my studies, I was constantly making theatre. My courses at U of T became very important sources of inspiration for me. Many of my early works are connected, in some way, to the reading and thinking I did for my degree. That is perhaps why many of my pieces today are contemporary adaptations of canonical texts.

U of T associate professor involved in lawsuit against Trump

rasbachn — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 05:00:00 +0000

U of T associate professor involved in lawsuit against Trump

rasbachn Wed, 11/29/2017 - 00:00

Cutline

U.S. President Donald Trump, in the Diplomatic Room at the White House earlier this month (photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

Wajiha Rasul

Topic

Global Lens

Faculty of Arts & Science

Faculty of Law

University of Toronto’s Simon Stern, an associate professor in the Faculty of Law and graduate faculty at the department of English, is involved in a lawsuit against U.S. President Donald Trump.

A watchdog group CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) filed a lawsuit against Trump in the southern district of New York earlier this year, alleging he is in violation of the constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. The clause bars the president and any other federal official from taking gifts and payments from a foreign government without approval of Congress.

CREW said in the lawsuit there has been a surge in bookings at the Trump International Hotel by foreign diplomats hoping to gain favour from Trump.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has asked the District Court to dismiss the lawsuit. DOJ argues that the foreign emoluments clause applies only to “benefits arising from services the president provides to the foreign state.” CREW filed a memorandum objecting to the DOJ'S motion to dismiss, arguing: “This gerrymandered reading contradicts the text of the [Emoluments] Clauses.”

The memorandum reads, “It is also at odds with two centuries of history and a robust body of precedent – from the Office of Legal Counsel and the Comptroller General – administered by government ethics lawyers every day.

"Diplomats openly claim that they patronize the President's hotels to curry favour with him as President – a blatant violation on any reading.”

CREW further points to a lack of transparency with regard to the President’s finances. “They are kept secret not only from the public and Congress but even from his own Justice Department lawyers, who are thus in no position to assure the Court that he is not currently violating the Emoluments Clauses. And, in fact, they offer no such assurances.”

Stern, along with a group of legal historians, filed an amicus brief in support of CREW’s opposition to the DOJ’s motion to dismiss. The case is still pending.

Wajiha Rasul of the Department of English spoke to Stern about his involvement in the lawsuit and arguments presented by DOJ and CREW.

"i thought it was a great opportunity," says Associate Professor Simon Stern about getting involved in the CREW lawsuit against Trump (photo by Wajiha Rasul)

How did you get involved in the lawsuit?

My friend and colleague John Mikhail, a law professor at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., was already involved in the historians’ amicus brief. He sent me a few questions about William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which he was using to try to elaborate the meaning of the term "emoluments" in the 18^th century. I had worked with some other legal historians on an edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, which was published by Oxford in 2016. John was looking at that text, in addition to others. We emailed back and forth and shared some thoughts about how and why contemporary texts are useful and what other contemporary texts might be useful.

After a few e-mail exchanges, he invited me to join in the amicus brief. I thought it was a great opportunity. A few other people I already knew were involved in the amicus brief, which made it even better.

Why was it important to participate?

The more I heard about the historians’ amicus brief, the more interesting it seemed. I saw it as a great opportunity to use my historical background and my knowledge about how to look for and use 18^th-century resources to shed light on the meaning of the term emoluments.

What do you think about the DOJ’s argument in their brief to dismiss the lawsuit?

The DOJ says that the foreign emoluments clause applies only to “benefits arising from services the president provides.” I think that common sense defies that interpretation of the clause. The clause says that the prohibition applies to “any present, emolument, office or title, of any kind whatever.” It seems nonsensical to say that although the clause covers any present whatever, it covers only a much more qualified set of emoluments.

The point in prohibiting presents is to ensure that the recipient won’t feel be inclined to favour someone over someone else; for example, one foreign state over another when making a treaty – and precisely the same logic applies to emoluments.

DOJ argues that this logic doesn’t apply to emoluments. I don’t see how one framework could apply to presents, and an entirely different framework could apply to emoluments. Both terms are included in the clause for the same reasons. Both terms are there to prevent same kind of harm. The DOJ’s argument, it seems to me, would not hold water even if you were not engaged in the historical investigation. I just don’t see how a “present of any kind whatever” means what it says, but an “emolument of any kind whatever” doesn’t mean what it says.

CREW has been criticized for reading the constitution’s foreign emoluments clause very broadly – what do you think about this criticism?

CREW’s argument does not seem unduly broad to me. The phrase “emoluments of any kind whatever” is meant to be broad. The question then arises: What would be too broad a reading? Well, too broad a reading is presumably one that sweeps in very small benefits, of a sort that nobody would expect to make the recipient favorably disposed towards the giver. Hotel accommodations and visits to golf courses are not very minor commercial dealings. It happens repeatedly and involves significant transactions.

If this lawsuit is successful, what will be the repercussions for the President?

It is difficult to say. At the minimum, I think that congressional approval will be required – that is the way to satisfy what the foreign emoluments clause demands. Possibly, Congress might say no to some emoluments, if they would think there is a conflict of interest. In other situations they might say yes. If the conclusion is in favour of CREW, it will allow Congress to go on record on emoluments. It will bring more transparency.

Deni Kasa explores the religious origins of liberalism at Tel Aviv University

rasbachn — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 04:00:00 +0000

Deni Kasa explores the religious origins of liberalism at Tel Aviv University

rasbachn Thu, 10/19/2017 - 00:00

Cutline

Deni Kasa on his research at Tel Aviv University: "The significance of this topic is that it helps us see religion and secular life as categories with shifting boundaries, especially in the early modern period (photo by Wajiha Rasul)

Wajiha Rasul

Topic

Remember This Name

Faculty of Arts & Science

Humanities

Deni Kasa remembers being apprehensive about coming to University of Toronto as an MA student in the department of English. "I had expected, based on the prestige of the school, that U of T would be a somewhat cold place where I would need to work very hard to get any attention."

But, he says, "I found U of T English to be a department that not only went toe-to-toe with the top universities in the world but that also preserved an intimate, warm, and genuinely supportive community." In fact, when it came time to do his PhD, "there was never any question in my mind about where to apply."

Kasa successfully defended his PhD dissertation – “Graceful Symmetry: The Politics of Grace in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton" – last month. His supervisor, Professor Paul Stevens, chair of the department of English in the Faculty of Arts & Science, describes Kasa as “a natural intellectual, a careful reader and imaginative thinker, quick on his feet and always willing to learn.”

Kasa, who hails from Albania, is part of a new generation of thinkers transforming research across the globe. They come from all corners of the world to do their PhD or postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto, drawn by the chance to work with the leading experts in their fields.

Where do they go from here?

In the latest instalment of a series from U of T News, we turn the spotlight on Kasa. Below, he talks about his postdoctoral fellowship at Tel Aviv University, his research on the anti-Trinitarian origins of liberalism and the significance of his work.

Why did you choose U of T?

I knew early on that I wanted my dissertation to include a significant component on John Milton, and U of T has been a leader in Milton studies for generations. The most important factor, however, was the friendliness of the department of English, which I first experienced during my MA. I had expected, based on the prestige of the school, that U of T would be a somewhat cold place where I would need to work very hard to get any attention. This expectation was totally wrong. I found U of T English to be a department that not only went toe-to-toe with the top universities in the world but that also preserved an intimate, warm, and genuinely supportive community. I couldn’t be happier that I was here, and there was never any question in my mind about where to apply for my doctoral studies.

How did taking English at U of T help you in your research?

The faculty is the key advantage. U of T boasts more specialists in early modern studies alone than most other English departments have in all periods combined. The faculty members are not only brilliant, but also very generous with their time. I found it very easy to find help on everything from research problems and methodologies to job applications and teaching strategies. My dissertation came directly out of these engaging discussions with various faculty members, and my successes in the postdoc applications and job market were largely due to the extremely generous feedback I received from the faculty.

Moreover, I couldn’t have done my work without U of T’s excellent resources for literary studies. The most important asset is the world-class library system, which has never left me unable to access the books I needed to do my research. My colleagues who work with rare books have benefited especially from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library; in my case, Robarts had all I needed and more. Finally, U of T is home to scholarly centres such as the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies (CRRS), which was a second home to me throughout my doctoral studies. I would recommend the CRRS and similar centres to all PhD students, because they are an excellent place to meet visiting scholars, speakers, and colleagues. The yearly Canada Milton seminar, which is organized through the CRRS, was especially valuable for my work because it gave me the chance to meet the leading researchers, not only in Milton studies but in 17^th century studies generally.

Can you describe your postdoctoral work at the Tel Aviv University?

I will be an Azrieli international postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Prof. Noam Reisner. The project will address the relationship between anti-Trinitarian theology and early liberalism in the works of Hugo Grotius, John Milton, and John Locke. The term “anti-Trinitarianism” describes a collection of Christian heresies which denied the divinity of Jesus. Instead of seeing him as a divine son of God, they saw him as a creature – either a human prophet or some more privileged person, but in all cases a creature. In the 16^th and 17^thcenturies, anti-Trinitarians began to attract a variety of European intellectuals, including Grotius, Milton, and Locke, among many others. These writers went on to influence several key concepts, such as religious tolerance and freedom of speech, which later came to be seen as the hallmarks of liberalism. I will explore the relationship between these writers’ anti-Trinitarian sympathies and the political positions for which they are better known today.

What attracted your interest towards anti-Trinitarian origins of liberalism?

I was attracted to this topic initially because I did some work on John Milton’s anti-Trinitarianism for my dissertation. As I researched the subject further, I learned that Grotius and Locke were also attracted to this religious position, and that all three of these writers are thought to have drawn upon anti-Trinitarian arguments to espouse religious tolerance and what might be described as a humanist understanding of Christianity. Intriguingly, historians have suggested that anti-Trinitarianism was in part a result of interfaith exchanges between various heretical Christians, as well as Jewish and Muslim theology. However, I found that much of the best criticism on this field is being done in history rather than literature departments. As a result, the topic was a natural fit for me because my research explores how literature helps to mobilize religious rhetoric for political ends. In other words, I want to explore not only what these writers argue, but also the literary or rhetorical form that they give to their arguments. Rhetoric and literary form bridge the religious context with the political positions adopted by these writers.

If your research proves that interfaith dialogue came first before liberalism, how significant will it be for academic society?

The significance of this topic is that it helps us see religion and secular life as categories with shifting boundaries, especially in the early modern period. Today, we sometimes think of religious tolerance as a byproduct of secular liberalism. However, if anti-Trinitarianism really did contribute to early forms of liberalism, perhaps the boundary between the religious and the secular was more porous in the past than it is today. Perhaps we need to revisit the intellectual exchanges within and between the Abrahamic religions in order to fully defamiliarize the early modern period, and through this defamiliarization come to a better understanding of our own historical moment.

Ultimately, I see this project as an effort to ask the kinds of questions that might estrange both past and the present.

Health humanities: The U of T expert behind the multidisciplinary program

rasbachn — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 04:00:00 +0000

Health humanities: The U of T expert behind the multidisciplinary program

rasbachn Mon, 09/18/2017 - 00:00

Cutline

Andrea Charise: "What attracts me to health humanities is how it asks researchers and educators to think about the relationship between the creative imagination of health and illness" (photo by Jennifer Rowsom)

Wajiha Rasul

Author legacy

Wajiha Rasul

Topic

Our Community

Department of English

Faculty of Arts & Science

University of Toronto Scarborough

Humanities

University of Toronto's Andrea Charise is the lead developer of Canada’s first undergraduate program in health humanities, which looks at the impact of the humanities and critical social sciences on health.

Charise, assistant professor, English and Interdisciplinary Centre for Health & Society at University of Toronto Scarborough, is also the founding director of SCOPE: The Health Humanities Learning Lab, an arts- and humanities-based research and education initiative.

“Health humanities or medical humanities, as it’s also sometimes called, can take a few different forms,” Charise says. “One approach involves more theoretical considerations of health, illness, disability and embodiment, as well as the aesthetics of representing illnesses like AIDS, cancer, dementia or depression in various creative media. But the field also encompasses more applied, hands-on practices: the use of arts-based health interventions such as art therapy, 'narrative medicine,' universal design, and health-care architecture, to name just a few.”

Health humanities has a broader and, arguably, more inclusive purview – than medical humanities, she says. “Because my own research involves investigating matters of health and illness as they exist outside of exclusively medical spaces – for example, in my work with allied health professionals (like nurses) or non-health-professional 'laypeople' – I prefer to use the language of health humanities,” she says. “But the politics of naming this field is an important issue that anyone interested in this field should be familiar with.”

She spoke to the department of English's Wajiha Rasul.

What shaped your interest in the relationship between the humanities, health and medicine?

What attracts me to health humanities is how it asks researchers and educators to think about the relationship between the creative imagination of health and illness, and how those ideas get put to work in the real world.

It’s common to hear criticisms of the arts and humanities as somehow disengaged from the urgency of contemporary life; and of course it’s essential to protect the creative arts from reductive assessments of their “use.” That said, health humanities offers us a powerful, concrete opportunity to argue for the value of the arts and humanities in the 21^stcentury – especially for people, disciplines or communities that aren’t used to thinking about the arts as something other than a nice hobby.

My own interest in the relationship between the humanities, health and medicine began when I was in grade school. My two favourite subjects were English and biology, but for much of my undergraduate and graduate career, my interest in the connection between arts and health felt a bit inchoate – a sense that was often reflected back at me by family members, teachers, advisers or other well-meaning people who would say things like, “well, you're either a science or an arts person,” or “that’s nice, but you’re going to have to choose one someday!” Even while I was doing my master’s degree, I got strong messages that my interests in arts and health were eccentric and that I’d have to come around if I wanted to be employable.

A turning point came – intellectually and professionally – when I was hired as a research associate in geriatric medicine at Parkwood Hospital in London, Ont. Much of the research I did at Parkwood focused on how to improve elder care curriculum in undergraduate medical education. One intervention involved an intergenerational dance initiative, which we discovered had the effect of improving medical students’ attitudes toward working with older people. For me, this project highlighted the potential for community-based arts interventions to improve health outcomes, medical education, and health delivery more generally, especially concerning older people.

How does literature facilitate what you want to understand about health?

Paying attention to the texture of creative representations of health and illness help us understand how thoroughly steeped in metaphor, symbol and narrative our accounts of the body are – and have been for a very long time. For example, in the book that I’m completing now, entitled Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, I examine how literary portraits of aging were entangled with increasingly medicalized ideas about what it meant to grow old.

Nineteenth-century Britain and Europe became increasingly attracted toward aging as a medical issue, but even as methods of understanding the body became more recognizably empirical, they still relied on deeply imaginative, even speculative, ideas of why bodies grew old. For example, immortality science was so closely connected with the political radicalism of the French Revolution, that a range of physicians, philosophers, and literary writers (like William Godwin, father of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley) believed that by manipulating thought and language we might avoid growing old entirely.

This sounds pretty far out, until you see how researchers in our own time have made similar claims about the life-shortening effects of ageist language, policies and beliefs. What literature helps me realize is how thoroughly our understanding of the body – even in the ostensibly neutral or objective realm of medicine and research – depends upon deeply symbolic patterns and aesthetic concerns.

What potential careers can health humanities offer to its graduates?

Bioethics, health law, health communication, disability studies, medical illustration, art-based therapy, and health design are just a few potential career pathways; Health humanities is also part of the curriculum of a growing number of health professions including medicine, nursing, and rehabilitation sciences.

Working with my graduate and undergraduate researchers (Katherine Shwetz, Mehdia Hassan, and Mariam Rashid), we’ve compiled a Health Humanities Postgraduate Education and Career Pathways resource that outlines a wide range of potential careers – with a focus on Canadian opportunities.

The good news is that health and allied health professions are increasingly open to collaborating with folks who have the special skills traditionally emphasized by humanities disciplines – including critical reading and thinking, close reading, oral and written communication, visual literacy, and narrative analysis.

If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student interested in pursuing this interdisciplinary field as a career, check out resources like SCOPE: The Health Humanities Learning Lab for more information on how to get involved.

Tell us about your own research in health humanities?

As a literary scholar with more than 15 years’ experience as a medical researcher (primarily in geriatrics), it’s clear to me that growing old is far more than just a physiological or biological phenomenon. What my interdisciplinary research aims to do is highlight the fascinating texture of aging, which is far more complex than the usual platitudes regarding decline or so-called “successful” aging.

My research and teaching are committed to demonstrating how the arts and humanities are especially valuable materials for exploring the many different meanings and expressions of aging – so I’m especially glad to have been chosen as the first recipient of the Digital Scholars Fellowship, co-sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute and University of Toronto Scarborough, to explore the special affordances of a digital approach to age studies and health humanities more generally.

What is the future of health humanities?

An interdisciplinary field like health humanities has many possible futures, but one important thread to follow will be how the relationship between arts, humanities, and health – how this intersection is taught, researched, and funded – plays out in different national contexts. The fact that North America, for example, is home to multiple public and private health-care systems means that our understanding of how the arts can – or should – be brought to bear on matters of health and illness is dependent upon these contexts.

The amplification of voices, experiences, and communities that have been historically marginalized or exploited in the name of health care, research, and policy is another necessary future for this field. If you’re interested, I’ve just recently written about these issues in an article for the Journal of Medical Humanities.