Caroline Hensley

• University of Wisconsin-Madison – PhD (ABD)
• University of Wisconsin-Madison – MA
• Clemson University – BA
• Clemson University – BS

Bio

Caroline Hensley, MA (she/her/hers) joined DFMCH in 2025 as a continuing education program manager developing support structures for family medicine faculty. Hensley’s previous roles with the University of Wisconsin-Madison English Department entailed designing and teaching health humanities courses, researching literature and medicine intersections, and providing academic and career advising to students. She also served as a Mellon-Morgridge Fellow for the Constellations program in the College of Letters & Sciences focusing on health and inequality research and instructional projects.

Hensley’s work is inspired by her interdisciplinary commitments to understanding how humanistic approaches can impact health care provision (and vice versa) through reflection, collaboration, inquiry, and continued learning.

Research Interests

Hensley’s dissertation research explores anglophone literatures by multiethnic American and postcolonial authors from the 1990s onward in which experiences of disability, illness, and health care are contextualized by points of global contact. Her projects investigate how literature transforms medical constructs, contests ableism and racism, and invites new modes of thinking and practicing bodily inhabitance and care.

Publications and Presentations

• Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal Contributions
• Hensley CM. Poisoned flesh: a disability studies reading of bodily and global contamination in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats. In: Kase Y, Kosaka E, eds. Emerging from the Rubble: Asian/American Writings on Disaster. Vernon Press; 2025:159-178.
• Hensley CM. Review of Crip Genealogies. J Midwest Mod Lang Assoc. 2023;56(2):113-117.
• Hensley CM. States of health: American medical imperialism and “home” remedies in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying. Presented at: Midwest Modern Language Association Annual Conference; November 15, 2024; Chicago, IL.
• Hensley CM. Anticolonial experiments: disabled narration and subaltern sciences in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. Presented at: Pacific and Ancient Modern Language Association Annual Conference; October 26, 2023; Portland, OR.

Awards and Honors

• 2025 Capstone Teaching Award – UW-Madison College of Letters & Sciences
• 2023 Outstanding Graduate Employee Award – UW-Madison College of Letters & Sciences
• 2022 Bucky Award for Peer Mentorship – UW-Madison College of Letters & Sciences