Hailey Haffey

Hailey Haffey, Ph.D., earned her doctorate in English literature at the University of Utah in 2018, with an emphasis on Irish, British, and American modernism through the lens of gender and religious studies. During her academic career, Haffey received numerous awards for research and teaching and was selected to study at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University in 2012.  

In addition to her graduate work, Haffey earned a Strategic Healthcare Leadership certificate through Cornell in 2018 and a Narrative Medicine certificate through Columbia University in 2023. Her scholarship explores the intersection of identity construction, language, religious traditions, and health. Recognizing the centrality of language and storytelling to identity and health, she is professionally active in both literary studies and healthcare education.  

She is an affiliate of the Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Utah’s Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine, and she holds leadership positions in the Health Humanities Consortium, including chair of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Belonging (JEDIB) Committee and co-chair of the Arts and Health Equity Committee.

Her recent research projects, currently being prepared for publication, include work on reproductive health in modernist Irish and American Literature, narrative medicine and mindfulness, use of narrative medicine as an intervention for clinicians treating patients with substance use disorder (SUD), and the use of narrative methods in designing a rural curriculum for internal medicine-pediatrics residency programs.  

At Wilson, Haffey teaches courses in English literature and healthcare and medical humanities. Her classes include Women Writers, American Literature, Global Health, Death and Dying, Narrative Medicine, and Empathy.