Amala Poli is a researcher in Medical/Health Humanities, Disability Studies, and Film and Media Studies. She completed her PhD in English at Western University in 2025, where she also held research fellowships in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the Faculty of Media Studies. She is the author of Writing the Self in Illness (2019), a monograph that examines life writing as a form of knowledge-making in North American and South Asian public health discourse. Her scholarship also appears in Leonardo (MIT Press), the Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CJSoTL), the Canadian Journal of Higher Education (CJHE), and periodically in Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal.

 

Amala’s research traces how cultural narratives intersect with biomedicine to shape beliefs about health and illness. Her work examines the epistemology of the sleep crisis, cure as a limiting framework for understanding sleep disorders, the technosocial interface of wellness discourse, and horror film/media as a creative and pleasurable mediation of contemporary anxieties. Drawing on her transnational background and scholarly networks in South Asia, she also considers how questions of health, technology, and embodiment circulate across diverse contexts.

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Committed to bridging academic work with community needs, Amala has a strong record of public outreach and mental health advocacy in India, Spain, and Canada. She has organized fundraisers for psychiatric rehabilitation centers and was part of the founding team of the Student Support Centre, a psychotherapy initiative at Manipal University in Karnataka. Her research on health, sleep, and cultural imagination complements the Beautiful Brains Collaboratory’s focus on memory, forgetting, and the lived realities of neurological conditions.

 

Links:

Twitter: X @amalapoli

LinkedIn: amalapoli14