Amala Poli

Amala Poli is a researcher in Health Humanities, Disability Studies, and Film and Media Studies. She completed her PhD at the Department of English at Western University in 2025. She is the author of Writing the Self in Illness (2019), a monograph that examines life-writing on illness as a form of knowledge-making in North America and South Asia. Her scholarship has appeared in Leonardo (MIT Press), The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CJSOTL), the Canadian Journal of Higher Education (CJHE), and Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. Currently, Amala is a member of the Beautiful Brains Collaboratory at York University and a research associate at Western University.

Her research traces how cultural narratives intersect with biomedicine to shape beliefs about health and illness. The epistemology of the sleep crisis, the technosocial interface of the wellness discourse, and horror as a creative and pleasurable mediation of contemporary anxiety are key areas of focus in her work. Drawing on her transnational background and scholarly networks in South Asia, she also considers how questions of health, technology, and embodiment circulate across diverse cultural contexts. Dedicated to connecting scholarly inquiry with community wellbeing, Amala has a strong record of public engagement and mental health advocacy across India, Spain, and Canada, including significant contributions to the founding of the Student Support Centre, a psychotherapy initiative at Manipal University in Karnataka.