International Health Humanities Network Membership

Marte Lie Noer is Music Therapist, Fellow of AMI ( Association for Music and Imagery ) and Musician. She has practiced for 20 years with children and adolescents in the pediatric and psychiatric field. Today she works at the Regional Center of Eating Disorders, Dept. of Child and Adolescent Psyciatry and Dept. of Child and Adolescent Pediatrics at the University Hospital of North Norway in Tromsø.

Grace Nono is a singer, ethnomusicologist who writes about the chants of Philippine shamans, and cultural worker. Grace received her bachelor's in Humanities and master's in Philippine Studies from the University of the Philippines-Diliman, and her doctorate in Ethnomusicology from New York University. She is also a recipient of fellowships and further training through the Asian Cultural Council in New York, the Asia-Pacific Performance Exchange program in Los Angeles, the Asia-Pacific Cultural Center for UNESCO in Kyoto, the Asian Institute of Management's Managing the Arts Program in Makati, the NYU Global Research Initiative in Florence, the Harvard Divinity School-Women's Studies in Religion Program and the Center for the Study of World Religions in Cambridge.

As a singer, Grace specializes in the performance of Philippine prayer chants and Visayan love laments taught to her by oral singers in different parts of the Philippines. She has been featured in concerts at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila, the House of World Cultures in Berlin, the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the Lincoln Center's La Casita Festival and the Asian American Arts Alliance's Locating the Sacred Festival in New York, the Asia Society in New York and Hong Kong, the Singapore Arts Festival and the National Museum of Singapore, the Music Village Festival in London, the Gathering of Drummers in Prague, concerts in Paris and Monte Carlo, WOMAD in Yokohama, the World Exposition on Nature's Wisdom in Nagoya, the Penang World Music Festival in Malaysia, the Asian Fantasy Orchestra tours of New Delhi, Bombay, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Miyazaki, Bangkok, Vientiane, Yangon, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh, various presentations in Huairou, Bangkok, Jakarta, Nanning, Shanghai, Seoul, Penang, Taipei, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago, Butuan, Bunawan, Davao, Ilo-ilo, Palawan, Mindoro, Bicol, Baguio, Zambales, Cagayan Valley, and Sagada. Grace has also published six award-winning solo albums and has contributed tracks to around fifteen recording compilations. In addition, she co-produced and co-published five recordings of Philippine oral music traditions.

As scholar, Grace generally writes about Philippine chants in relation to issues of indigenous religion, gender and transnationalism. She has published two books in the Philippines (with accompanying recordings): The Shared Voice: Chanted and Spoken Narratives from the Philippines (ANVIL Publishing and Fundacion Santiago, 2008), winner in the 2009 Book Awards; and Song of the Babaylan: Living Voices, Medicines, Spiritualities of Philippine Ritualist-Oralist-Healers (Institute of Spirituality in Asia, 2013), winner in the 2014 Gintong Aklat Awards, and the 2014 Catholic Book Awards.

As cultural worker, Grace founded the Tao Foundation for Culture and Arts, a Philippine non-government organization engaged in cultural regeneration initiatives, for which she has received support from the National Commission for Culture and Arts, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Sanctuary Fund, Toyota Foundation, UNESCO, Advocates of Philippine Fair Trade, Australia-Philippines Community Cooperation Program, and local communities and institutions.

To date, Grace has won over 40 awards, including The Outstanding Women in the Nation's Service or TOWNS award, the Ten Outstanding Young Men or TOYM award, the University of the Philippines Distinguished Alumni award, three Album of the Year awards, three Best World Music Album awards, three national book awards, several Catholic Mass Media, Katha, Awit, National Press Club, and other awards for her artistic and cultural contributions.

I am currently a doctoral candidate at the "Space, Image, Text, Territory" Doctoral School (SD- SITT), University of Bucharest.  My PhD Thesis is  entitled "Clinical Encounters: the Medical Imaginary in Contemporary Visual Arts". This current research uses an inter- and multidisciplinary theoretical frame ranging from Medical Humanities to Contemporary Art Theory and Cultural Studies. I examine how artists make use of a clinical setting, clinical tools such as medical imaging techniques and even a clinical gaze.

Alongside my medical background in Epidemiology  I have a Master's Degree in Image Theory and Practice (2017) from the Center of Excellence in Image Studies (CESI), University of Bucharest. My dissertation "The Self- Portrait marked by AIDS. Mapplethorpe and Morrisroe" explores as a general scope how images of  the body with AIDS and persons with AIDS shaped the perception of the disease. I focus on the works of Robert Mapplethorpe and Mark Morrisroe and analyse the ways they portray their altered appearance and  how their final self portraits reflect their artistic praxis in a sublimated form. 

My most recent project makes use of my curatorial and art writing abilities and will hopefully  draw attention to topics such as community health and the importance of an artistic response to global health crises and concerns. 

My research interests are wide-ranging and include comparative and world literature, medical humanities and twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American and Iberian literature. My work in the Medical Humanities has made a major impact through the two events that I organised at the University of Kent in 2011: ‘The Art of Medicine in Iberian and Latin American Literature’ (co-organised with Dr William Rowlandson) and in 2012: ‘The Mexican Day of the Dead’. These events addressed a new approach in Iberian and Latin American literature and film concerning the relationship between art and healing.

My publication record in the medical humanities includes an article published in Medical Humanities on Literature and Disability in Borges and Beckett (2011), a chapter on Greek tragedy and healing included in the ‘Routledge Advances in the Medical Humanities Series’ edited by Bleakley, Bates, and Goodman (2014), and an edited volume entitled: Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine (Routledge, 2015). Apart from the editorial work, my research contribution to this volume includes a 10,000 word introduction that offers a theorisation of the field, and a 9,000 word chapter on the Spanish physician and Nobel Laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Future work includes an article on ‘Cajal and Hypnotism’ co-written with Lesley Gray.

Originally from Enugu, Nigeria, West Africa, Uzoamaka has infused her education with her passion for dance to create a program promoting the positive health effects of dance called The Uzo Method Project. As a first generation Nigerian woman, Uzoamaka Nwankpa  has created diverse ways to preserve her culture in the United States through innovative workshops, presentations and performances. She is an advocate for dance in the medical world aiding in the awareness of dance as a form of self healing. As an international educator, she facilitates educational workshops addressing health and wellness through music and dance. Uzo is a registered nurse in the U.S and received her masters of science in nursing with emphasis in public health from Grand Canyon University. For more information about Uzo, visit www.theuzo.com 

Postdoc in Medical Humanities scholar with a focus on  Anglophone Caribbean and South African literature and culture

Han O'Connor is a postgraduate researcher at Cardiff University. Her research focuses on Gothic literature, particularly representations of medicine, surgery, sexuality, psychoanalysis, illness and disease, trauma, monstrosity and the body. She has recently presented at Gothic conferences in Auckland and Mexico City, as well as others more locally. Her objective is to undertake further study in Graduate Entry Medicine in the near future, in order to pursue a career in Medicine. In her spare time, she volunteers for Diabetes UK and edits MedicalGothic.com, an educational website dedicated to the study of Medical Humanities and the Gothic. 

Yewande is an interdisciplinary scholar with academic qualifications in Biochemistry, (B.Sc. University of Ilorin, Nigeria) Educational Research Methodology, (University of Nottingham, PG, Dip) Conceptual Art (M.F.A Slade School of Fine Art) and History of Medicine (MA, Wellcome Centre for History of Medicine University College London).

Yewande will complete dher AHRC/ Collaborative Doctoral Award thesis – Contested Knowledges: Tracing Patient and Scientific Expertise and the Emergence of Medical Cannabis in England (1992- 2017) in June 2018. Yewande conducted oral history interviews with politicians, policy makers, scientists, patients, and activists and writes a more nuanced exposition about the historical contingencies which shaped the production of knowledge and the re medicalisation of cannabis as a twenty first century medicine.

Prior to returning to academia, Yewande worked as a chemist at the Body Shop and was part of the pioneering research and development team, which investigated animal testing alternatives and formulated innovative hair, skin, and perfumery products which defined the natural and ethical skin care movement of the 1990’s. Yewande later lectured on the Cosmetic Science degree course, University of the Arts, London where she gained a Post Graduate Diploma in Teaching & Learning. Yewande has conducted pedagogic research in HE and has used action research, interviews, and focus group interviews as research methodologies. Yewande trained in the Carpe Diem methodology for on-line course development and worked with the University of Derby, Psychology team to design on – line courses.

I am a Registered Psychiatric/Mental Health Nurse. I reside in Enugu, Nigeria. 

Anna Ovaska (PhD, M. Soc. Sc.) is a postdoctoral researcher at Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University and visiting researcher at University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research is situated in the intersections of narrative theory, feminist/queer theory, embodied cognitive science, and medical humanities. Her publications deal with the affective, embodied, and political dimensions of reading and narrative representations of pain, illness, and disability. Her monograph Shattering Minds: Experiences of Mental Distress in Modernist Finnish Literature (Finnish Literature Society 2023) explores the interaction between readers and the text in first-person narratives of mental illness. Anna has been a Fulbright fellow in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and a visiting scholar at Literature and the Mind Program at University of California, Santa Barbara.