About us

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.

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.