Arden Hegele, PhD, writes and teaches about literature and the history of ideas, specializing in nineteenth-century British literature and the medical humanities. Her first book is Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading, published with Oxford University Press in 2022. Her second book, Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities, co-edited with Dr. Rishi Goyal, was published with Bloomsbury in 2022 and came out in paperback in 2024. Also with Dr. Goyal, she has co-founded Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal and has co-edited a special issue of Journal of Medical Humanities on “Conception and Its Discontents.” Her biography of Byron is under contract with Princeton University Press. Hegele has been awarded a Mellon Fellowship at The Society of Heyman Center for the Humanities and a Carr-Thomas-Ovenden Visiting Fellowship in English Literature at the University of Oxford.
Hegele’s articles and chapters have appeared in European Romantic Review, Romanticism, The Byron Journal, Keats-Shelley Journal, Partial Answers, Gender and Education, Persuasions, interconnections: journal of posthumanism, and an edited volume, Horror in Antiquity and Beyond. Her book reviews are featured in Public Books, Review 19, Studies in Romanticism, Victorian Network, Partial Answers, Avidly, Nuncius: Journal of the History of Science, Modern Philology, The Wordsworth Circle, and other publications. She has been a reviewer at British Medical Journal, Prose Studies, Keats-Shelley Journal, OUP, and elsewhere. She has served on the advisory boards of BMJ: Medical Humanities and (outside the academy) of Creatives Care, a New York City nonprofit that assists artists with finding low-cost mental healthcare.
At Columbia, Hegele has taught courses in English and Comparative Literature, in Medical Humanities at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, in Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia Medical Center, and in the Core Curriculum. She served as the organizer of the Explorations in the Medical Humanities Series at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities; the co-director of the Motherhood and Technology Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference; and the research coordinator of the “Increasing Covid-19 Vaccine Confidence” project at Columbia World Projects. Hegele also hosted the Summer Institute of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes Health and Medical Humanities Network at Columbia Global Centers | Paris and convened a conference on Conception and Its Discontents in New York for the Center for the Study of Social Difference.
