English Department Faculty
Amy Boesky
Professor
Director, Minor in Medical Humanities, Health and Culture
Amy Boesky
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S495
Telephone: 617-552-3810
Email: boesky@bc.edu
Education
- A.B., Harvard College
- M.Phil. in Renaissance English, University of Oxford
- Ph.D., Harvard University
Research Interests
Medical Humanities; Creative Nonfiction; Memoir; Representations of Self
Department
Biography
Amy Boesky is a Professor of English and directs BC’s minor in Medical Humanities. Trained in early modern literature, she regularly teaches courses on early representations of self, body, and biomedical culture. Author of a memoir on her family’s experience with hereditary cancers, What We Have (Penguin, 2010), she is also editor of The Story Within, a collection of personal essays on genetics and identity (Hopkins, 2013). Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly, and Kenyon Review (online). Amy’s new work focuses on narrative medicine and personal writing about breast cancer, from the early modern period to the present.
Selected Publications
- What We Have: A Memoir (Penguin, 2010).
- The Story Within: Personal Essays on Genetics and Identity, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press (2013).
- “The Ghost Writes Back,” Kenyon Review online
- “This is How We Live: Witnessing and Testimony in BRCA Memoirs,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2014.
- “From Diagnosis to Gnosis: Writing, Knowledge and Repair in Breast Cancer and BRCA narratives.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (Johns Hopkins), Winter, 2015.