HEAL: Health, Environment, Arts and Literature is an interdisciplinary research group working in the fields of Medical and Environmental Humanities. We look at the literary, artistic, cultural and historical representations of health and illness, both human and nonhuman, and are particularly interested in the strong connections between ill human bodies and the degradation and destruction of natural habitats and blue spaces. The recent appearance, spread and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is one of our interests and we are currently looking at textual and visual articulations of lockdown, social distancing, contagion and care.
Heal also plays an intense curatorial role in the areas of dance, performance, photography, installation, video art and film in arts centres, universities and urban sites, collaborating with local, national and international artistic communities.
Based at the University of Oviedo, our team is composed of academic specialists from our home institution and the universities of Newcastle and Harvard, as well as a number of healthcare professionals.
We invite you to explore our website, designed as a repository of academic and artistic resources related to our areas of interest.
Members
University of Oviedo
University of Oviedo
Newcastle University
SESPA
Principality of Asturias Health Service
University of Oviedo
University of Oviedo
University of Oviedo
Visual artist
Harvard University
University of Oviedo
PhD Students
UO Programme — Plan Plurianual de Investigación
University of Oviedo
Severo Ochoa Programme
University of Oviedo
Severo Ochoa Programme
University of Oviedo
University of Oviedo
Visiting Scholars
LOLA ARTACHO MARTÍN
University of Málaga
Visiting: July 2025
Lola Artacho Martín is a fully funded PhD candidate at the University of Málaga, supervised by Prof. Rosario Arias Doblas. Her research focuses on life writing and illness narratives, Health Humanities, and the ethics of care. These interests align with the research project “Re-orienting Assemblage Theory in Anglophone Literature and Culture” (RELY, PID2022-137881NB-I00), whose PR is Prof. Rosario Arias. She is also an active member of the LITCAE research group (Literaturas contemporáneas en el ámbito europeo).
Lola holds a bachelor’s degree in English Studies and a master’s degree in English Studies and Multilingual and Intercultural Communication from the University of Málaga, both awarded with honours, as well as a master’s in Secondary Education Teaching from UNED. In addition to her research, she serves as a tutor at the Writing Centre of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Málaga.
So far, she has attended and participated in multiple national and international conferences, seminars and symposia to share her ongoing research in relation to her PhD thesis. In January 2025, she published her first article in Canada and Beyond (vol. 14), titled “Assembling Reading and Writing in the Face of Loss: Christa Couture’s How to Lose Everything and Dakshana Bascaramurty’s This Is Not the End of Me”. In addition, she has contributed to AEDEAN’s journal Nexus 2024.1 and 2025.1 with two reviews on Unhappy Beginnings: Narratives of Precarity, Failure and Resistance in North American Texts, by Fabián Orán-Llarena and Isabel González-Díaz, and on Ethics of (In-)Attention in Contemporary Anglophone Narrative, by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, respectively.
She has actively participated in dissemination initiatives, such as the seminar “Ensamblaje, relacionalidad y ética en la literatura anglófona desde la perspectiva de género”, hosted by Centro Andaluz de las Letras (Málaga) and IGIUMA, and co-organised by Dr. Rosario Arias Doblas and Dr. Magdalena Flores Quesada.
AMANDA CIAFONE
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Visiting: September 2024-July 2025
Amanda Ciafone is Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with appointments in the Institute for Communications Research, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Ciafone co-edits the University of Illinois books series The Geopolitics of Information, which publishes work in the political economy of transnational media. She holds a PhD from Yale University and a BA from Brown University, both in American Studies.
Ciafone’s research and teaching is at the nexus of cultural history and cultural studies of the United States in the world, political economy, culture and media industries, and social movements. Her first book, Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation (University of California, 2019), examines The Coca-Cola Company and the politics, cultural representations, and social movements – including labor, environmental, health critiques – around the multinational corporation.
For the last several years she has been working in the field of humanistic studies of aging. She co-edited the “Old/Age” issue of Radical History Review and has published work on the Gray Panthers and televisual representations of older age in Feminist Media Studies on care work and interdependence in the Routledge collection Critical Humanities and Ageing, and imaginaries of retirement migration in the edited book, Care Home Stories. While a Visiting Scholar with HEAL, she will be working on a book manuscript on the cultural history of aging in the twentieth century US.
J’AIME MORRISON
California State University
Visiting: Autumn 2023
J’aime Morrison is a Professor of Theatre and Movement at California State University, Northridge and she holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. She was a faculty Fulbright Scholar in Movement and spent a semester teaching in Lisbon, Portugal and has taught Master Classes in Dance and Movement in Shanghai, Dublin, Belfast, Los Angeles and New York City.
A dancer, choreographer, theatre director, educator and most recently a filmmaker, she is an expert in movement, physical expression and somatic studies. With Mourning Surf, she turns her attention to grief and the body, specifically how grief is expressed physically and how movement is an essential part of the grieving and healing process.
After losing her beloved husband Jim to brain cancer in 2015, J’aime began working on a short film titled Upwell,which composes a visual intersection of body movements to translate her experience with grieving, illustrating the role of both dance and surfing in moving her healing journey.
The film has been an Official Selection at numerous film festivals and won “Best Experimental Film” from The Santa Barbara International Fine Art Film Festival and the California International Shorts Film Festival.
For the international organization Hope for Widows J’aime developed a grief movement curriculum, “In Waves…Grief Moves” and she continues to offer this work through workshops, retreats and private coaching sessions. Recently she has collaborated with Camp Widow, TwoCan Retreats, Waves of Grief Collective and Reimagine.
For more information, please visit www.mourningsurf.com or follow along @mourningsurf.
MONIKA GLOSOWITZ
University of Silesia
Visiting: May 2023
Monika Glosowitz currently works as Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Polonia. She has recently published Maszynerie afektywne. Literackie strategie emancypacji w najnowszej polskiej poezji kobiecej [Affective Machineries. Literary Strategies of Emancipation in Contemporary Polish Women’s Poetry] (IBL PAN, 2019) and co-edited the volumes Imagined Geographies. Central European Spatial Narratives between 1984 and 2014 (ibidem Press, 2018) and Dyskursy gościnności. Etyka współbycia w perspektywie późnej nowoczesności [Discourses of Hospitality. The Ethics of Coexistence in the Late Modernity Perspective] (IBL PAN, 2018).
She specializes in literary studies, with an additional research interest in feminist theories, philosophies of affect and environmental humanities. She has started a new research project that interrogates the invisibility of women in narratives of coal mining areas in Poland.
She has been awarded the Poznań Literary Award-Stanisław Barańczak’s Scholarship in 2020. Since 2022 sha has been a member of the jury for The Silesius Poetry Award [Polish: Wrocławska Nagroda Poetycka Silesius]. She holds PhDs from the University of Silesia and the University of Oviedo and MAs in Gender Studies from the University of Utrecht and the University of Granada.