International Health Humanities Network Membership

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.