emily waples

writer, educator, human(ist)

I am Associate Professor and Carol C. Donley Ph.D. ‘60 Endowed Chair in Biomedical Humanities and Director of the Center for Literature and Medicine at Hiram College, where I teach courses on subjects such as illness narratives, the history of epidemics, narrative bioethics, death and dying, gender and medicine, writing about the body, and the ethics and culture of Grey’s Anatomy.

My scholarship on literature and medicine has appeared in Gothic Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, and elsewhere. I have been a contributing writer for the online health humanities magazine Synapsis, and my creative nonfiction has been published in literary journals including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Los Angeles Review, River Teeth, Ploughshares, and Southern Humanities Review. My memoir-in-essays, Unlikely, is forthcoming (Spring 2027) from the University of Georgia Press’ Crux series in literary nonfiction.

I earned my A.B. in English from Vassar College, M.St. in English and American Studies from the University of Oxford, and Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan.

I am represented by Wendy Levinson of the Harvey Klinger Literary Agency.