Ira Halpern
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow
Ira Halpern’s recent research investigates the injustice of illness and the ways that literary writers, reformers, doctors, and patients have addressed it by reimagining and intervening in the medical system. Halpern’s teaching focuses on these themes among others, on topics ranging from American Literature to Medical Memoir to Queer Literature/Queer Lives. His first book, Imagining Health: Medicine, Social Protest, and Modern American Literature (The University of Massachusetts Press 2026) shows how fiction writers such as Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, and Upton Sinclair, among others, sought to radically reshape the political possibilities of modern medicine around the early twentieth century. His work bridges divisions between the sciences and the arts, and he welcomes queries, conversations, and collaboration related to the history of medicine and the cultural politics of health.
