Ian and Dieter talk with Prof Margarita Saona (University of Illinois Chicago) about her experience as a literary scholar trying to find her way through the labyrinth of the health humanities. You'll also hear about Margarita’s experience of being a heart transplant patient, and how this impacted her writing and her thinking.

Prof Margarita Saona teaches literature at the University of Illinois Chicago. She studied linguistics and literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She received a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Columbia University in New York. She is interested in issues of memory, cognition, empathy, and representation in literature and the arts. She has published numerous articles, two books on literary and cultural criticism, Novelas familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Rosario, 2004) and Memory Matters in Transitional Perú (London, 2014), three books of short fiction, Comehoras (Lima, 2008) Objeto perdido (Lima, 2012), and La ciudad en que no estás (Lima, 2021) and a book of poems, Corazón de hojalata/Tin Heart (Chicago, 2017). Her new book of cultural and literary studies, Despadre: La masculinidad y la crisis de la identidad en la cultura peruana which examines the way representations of men in Peruvian literature and film reveal deep fractures in the country’s imaginary, will appear later this year. She is currently working on a non-fiction book entitled Corazón en trance.