International Health Humanities Network Membership

Marina Tsaplina is a U.S. based performing artist, patient advocate and Founder, CEO and Creative Director of THE BETES Organization whose mission is to employ the performing arts to help people with chronic conditions form a flourishing relationship with their health.

A Scholar in the Medical Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine - Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine, her work is dedicated to bringing artistic intervention into health care in order to achieve a more inclusive culture that elevates the patient and artist voice. Through BETES growing programming, she brings the unique power of arts-based research to chronic illness care to serve patients young and old, caregivers, and to strengthen the clinician-patient relationship.

She has lived with Type 1 diabetes since she was two years old.

She studied puppetry in Germany, France, and the U.S. and has always been driven to investigate interdisciplinary applications of the arts in order to deliver transformative social impact.

“Artists hold a key value proposition for our current health care system. Amidst automation and advanced technological innovation, there is still a deep need to nurture the human spirit of the person who lives within a body that is in some way not well. This is the space for artistic practice to thrive and serve the entire ecosystem of care.”

Lecturer in Health Ethics, Law and Professionalism with a background in philosophy and bioethics, interested in health humanities.

Historian of art and architecture. PhD student working on medical/health humanities.

I am postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Turku, a cultural historian interested in various kinds of autobiographical texts from letters and diaries to published autobiographies. I have written about cultural history of women’s writing, cultural history of psychiatry, history of melancholia. My monograph (PhD thesis) analyzed women’s autobiographical texts on melancholia in the late nineteenth century Scandinavia. At the moment I am involved in two research projects, one of them focuses on written madness – mental illness in Finnish autobiographies and novels. The other one focuses on the ‘inner child’ in Finnish autobiographical literature in the context of emerging Finnish 'mind sciences'.

I am an academic and clinician with a keen interest in the social, cultural and political dimensions of health.

Richard is a staff of the department of Theatre and Film studies department, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Enugu state Nigeria. B.A theatre and film studies University of nigeria, Nsukka, M.A Theatre Arts (Design and Management) from the University of Lagos and an M.A in Theratre Scenography from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. I am involved community theatre and Theatre for children and young people. I have special interest in Health and developmental initiatives.

Dr Lalit Kumar Upadhyay PHD, DYA

Founder President United World Against Diabetes

United World Against Diabetes (UWAD) is a non-government organisation fighting against diabetes in India. The mission of UWAD is to promote diabetes care, control, prevention, awareness and working to increase access of essential medicines and insulin for diabetic people. We are advocate for children with Type 1 diabetes and women living with diabetes.

I am a freelance recycling artist interested in ripping paper as a self soothing non pharmaceutical intervention to regulate mood.

Julia has worked as a painter and photographer for over 30 years. She has taught Art at secondary level and Historical and Theoretical Studies and Design Management at undergraduate level in departments of Art and Design.

She is interested in the potential of the arts to enhance wellbeing and protect good mental health. She has been active in the organisation of Wirksworth Festival, Derbyshire and has run community arts projects. 

Currently, she is working as an Art Psychotherapist with students in an academy school in Nottinghamshire.

Dr. Sathyaraj Venkatesan is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. He received Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. He was a Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, New York and a Senior International Bibliographer with the Publications of Modern Language Association of America (PMLA). 

He is widely travelled including USA, UK, France, Singapore, Malaysia, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand, Srilanka, Taiwan. 

He is the author of The Idea and Practice of Reading (2018, Singapore; Springer)  with R. Joseph Ponniah, Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Other Writings (2017, Orient BlackSwan), AIDS in Cultural Bodies: Scripting the Absent Subject (1980-2010) (2016, Cambridge Scholars Publishing) with Gokulnath Ammanathil and Mapping the Margins: A Study of Ethnic Feminist Consciousness in Toni Morrison’s Novels (2011). 

Presently, he is at work on three book projects: "India Retold" (contract under Bloomsbury/USA); "Gender, Eating Disorders and Graphic Medicine" (contract under Routledge/UK); "Travails of Motherhood: Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine" (contract under Routledge/UK).  

His articles have appeared in Web of Science/Scopus indexed journals such as Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, American Medical Association Journal of Ethics (AMA), Health, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, World Literature Today (WLT), The Explicator, International Fiction Review, Journal of Creative Communications, Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, MELUS, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, AMULA, American Notes and Queries, Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels and also in a number of renowned publications including INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, The  London Film and Media Reader, Notes on Contemporary Literature among others.

His interview/article/profile is mentioned in media such as The Hindu, The New Indian Express, JoongAng Libo (South Korean), Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhoomi.