Iro Filippaki

Iro Filippaki is a Medical Humanities scholar, focusing on literary representations of physical and mental trauma. After completing her graduate studies at the University of Glasgow, and a postdoctoral research post at Johns Hopkins University, Iro has returned to Athens, Greece where she currently teaches Medical Humanities and other interdisciplinary courses at the American College of Greece. Apart from co-editing Tendon, she is also an editor for De Gruyter’s book series Computer Games and the Humanities. Her monograph published in 2021 was titled The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature, and her current research focuses on representations of injury and resilience, and impatient bodies in literature.

Alise Leiboff

Alise Leiboff received her undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University in 2021, where she studied the Medical Humanities, French, and the Visual Arts. She then went on to obtain a Master’s degree in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University in 2023. Now a medical student at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine and a vetted editor for Tendon Magazine, Leiboff seeks to tread the common ground between the health sciences, literature, and the arts.

Sarah Roth

Sarah Roth is a genetic counselor and PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her work bridges the social sciences and humanities, exploring the experiences of patients, communities, and providers navigating shifting ethical, social, and technological terrains in cancer care and genomic medicine. Sarah was recently a predoctoral fellow in Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.

Also a writer, Sarah is a Pushcart Prize nominee and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Notre Dame. She is a founding editor of Tendon and a contributing writer at Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. Before arriving to Baltimore, Sarah coordinated programs at a health advocacy nonprofit in Washington, D.C.

Sarah El Halabi

Alexandra Kaul

Alexandra Kaul is a writer and anthropologist. Her research investigates the interplay of memory, ecology, and white supremacy in her native Germany and the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been featured in the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Fieldsights series, Tendon Magazine, and is forthcoming with The Georgia Review. She is currently finishing a book-length meditative essay on memory, place, and diaspora and is working on a second manuscript, an equally weird and deeply researched account of industrial forestry in Oregon.

She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and The University of Chicago.

Alexander Parry

Alex Parry is a Ph.D. candidate with the History of Medicine Department at Johns Hopkins. His dissertation charts the ways U.S. society has tried to control the use and sale of risky products and explains why longstanding approaches to home safety overburden women and low-income households. This project has received funding from institutions including the National Science Foundation and JHU Center for Injury Research and Policy.

Alex has published on U.S. public health with the Journal of the History of Biology, Isis, Nursing Clio, and the Washington Post. He also convenes the Injury Studies Research Network (ISRN), which brings together investigators from multiple disciplines to analyze the social and material realities of injuries and to propose forward-looking policy solutions.

SJ Zanolini

SJ Zanolini is a PhD candidate in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, with prior graduate degrees in Chinese Literature and Traditional East Asian Medicine. Their dissertation focuses on medicinal discourse about cheap and widely available foods such as porridge, sweet potatoes, and seaweed in early modern China, first as a means of describing everyday medical practices at the household level, and second to elaborate how intellectual theorizations of the physiology of taste fed competing understandings of chronic ailment, health, and longevity. An avid reader and writer, SJ is also working on a creative non-fiction book on migraines.