Bio

Arden Hegele grew up on the west coast of Canada.  She writes about literature and the history of ideas, with a particular interest in how the arts have unexpectedly influenced empirical knowledge.

Her first book, Romantic Autopsy, told the story of how the great poets and novelists of Regency-era England drew inspiration from medicine—and how they changed medicine in turn.

Her second, Culture and Medicine, which she wrote with Dr. Rishi Goyal, was a collection of essays exploring how medical knowledge is constructed and circulated within the arts.

Hegele also co-founded the journal Synapsis, which develops a public conversation between humanities scholars and physicians.

Her forthcoming biography of Lord Byron, contracted with Princeton University Press, reveals its imperfect hero as a thoroughly modern, self-aware person whose story tells us more about our world today than it did in his own moment. Written as the bicentenary of Byron’s death is celebrated around the world, the book begins with his postmortem examination.

Educated first at Trinity College, University of Toronto, Arden Hegele earned her PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she now teaches. She lives in New York City.

Hegele has been awarded a Mellon Fellowship at The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, and a Carr-Thomas-Ovenden Visiting Fellowship in English Literature at the University of Oxford. 

She also serves on the board of Creatives Care, a non-profit in New York City providing access to mental healthcare for artists and musicians.