About me

I am a medical humanities scholar and Professor of Interdisciplinary Health Science at the University of Oslo. Since 2023, I have served as Dean of the Open Campus at Circle U., an alliance of nine European universities.

My research explores how evidence becomes care and how knowledge, institutions and technologies shape our capacity to recognise and respond to suffering. I am particularly interested in the interpretive work that connects medical knowledge with people’s lives, and in the social and ecological conditions that make compassionate care possible.

Intellectual background

My academic background is in intellectual and cultural history. I studied with Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva in Paris, developing a longstanding research collaboration with Kristeva. These encounters helped shape my interest in language, interpretation, and the relationship between general categories and singular lives.

My early research examined expert accounts in child welfare and the role of disease prestige in healthcare priorities. Across these settings, I asked whose experiences become credible, who is authorised to speak for others, and how professional descriptions shape the recognition of needs. These questions continue to inform my work on evidence, empathy and compassion.

Research and approach

With Julia Kristeva and colleagues, I have developed translational medical humanities as an approach that brings medical knowledge translation into dialogue with humanistic translation studies. We examine the texts, practices and institutions through which knowledge is produced and translated, attending to the language and narratives that make illness intelligible and care possible.

At the Centre for Advanced Study, John Ødemark and I co-led a research programme examining how medical knowledge changes as it moves between disciplines, languages and settings. In a WHO report with Trisha Greenhalgh, John Ødemark and Priya Umachandran, we examined the implications of cultural context for translating evidence into policy and practice.

My work treats empathy and compassion as practices shaped by how evidence is interpreted, services are organised and technologies represent people. I ask how guidelines account for lives that do not fit their categories and how hospital-at-home services accommodate different experiences of home and belonging. My recent Lancet article with Kirsten Ostherr and Angela Woods, Ambient scribes as narrative technologies, examines how AI-generated clinical notes select and reorganise patients’ accounts, shaping what becomes visible in the medical record and available to guide care.

With Mona Baker, I have co-authored Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Beyond the Bedside: A Narrative Model of Knowledge Translation in Reproductive Health (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026). These books examine how narratives shape the production and interpretation of evidence, and why people can reach different conclusions from the same research.

My sustainability research examines the conflicts that arise when broad commitments become practical decisions: whose needs take priority, who bears the costs of change, and how environmental goals intersect with social justice. I also study how education can prepare health professionals to recognise and negotiate these tensions.

Explore my research groups and collaborations

Academic leadership and education

Much of my academic leadership has involved creating environments in which different disciplines and forms of knowledge can work together.

I co-founded and directed the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), funded as a Norwegian Centre of Excellence in Education for 2020–2026. We developed teaching methods through which students investigated competing understandings of sustainable healthcare using policy documents, patient testimonies and collaborative analysis. I was also the founding head of the Sustainable Health Unit (SUSTAINIT) at the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Medicine.

From 2019 to 2022, I served as Dean of Education at the Faculty of Medicine. My earlier responsibilities included doctoral education and the development of interdisciplinary research training.

Teaching, supervision and mentoring remain central to my work. I am particularly interested in helping students and early-career researchers develop the confidence and interpretive judgement needed to work across disciplinary boundaries.

Education and academic appointments

I received my master’s degree in intellectual history from the University of Oslo in 2001 and my PhD in cultural history in 2006.

Before joining the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Medicine, I worked as an associate professor of philosophy of science at the institution now known as Oslo Metropolitan University, where I helped develop doctoral education in social policy and social work. I joined UiO in an adjunct position in 2009, became Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Health Science in 2011, and was appointed full professor in 2012.