Anna Magdalena Elsner
Senior Fellow 2024–2025

Anna Magdalena Elsner is associate professor of French Studies and Medical Humanities at the University of St. Gallen. Her work on death, dying and mourning in twentieth-century and contemporary French literature, philosophy and film aims to foster a culture of critical as well as transdisciplinary thinking about medicine, care and the end of life. She is the principal investigator of Assisted Lab, an ERC project that engages with the aesthetics, laws and ethics of assisted dying.

Anna holds a BA in philosophy and modern languages from Oxford University and obtained her PhD in 2011 from the University of Cambridge. She has since held positions and fellowships at King’s College London, the University of Texas Medical Branch, the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, the Hastings Center, the University of Zurich and the Camargo Foundation, Cassis. She is the author of Mourning and Creativity in Proust (Palgrave, 2017) and the co-editor of The Proustian Mind (Routledge, 2022) and Literature and Medicine (Cambridge UP, 2024).