People

Anne Harrington

Chair, Professor of the History of Science
Ph.D. 1985, Oxford University

harringtonAnne Harrington, Chair, is Harvard College Professor and Professor for the History of Science, specializing in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind sciences. She is also Visiting Professor for Medical History at the London School of Economics, where she co-edits a new journal called Biosocieties.

Professor Harrington received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Oxford University, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and the University of Freiburg in Germany. For six years, she co-directed Harvard's Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative (mbb.harvard.edu). She also was a consultant for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interactions (www.mindbody.org). Currently she serves on the Board of the Mind and Life Institute, an organization dedicated to cross-cultural dialogue between Buddhism and the sciences (www.mindandlife.org).

She is the author of two books: Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain (1987) and Reenchanted Science (1997). A third book, Stories under the Skin: Mind-Body Medicine and its Histories, will be published by W.W. Norton. She has also published many articles and produced a range of edited collections including The Placebo Effect (1997), Visions of Compassion (2000), and The Dalai Lama at MIT (2006). She is currently also working on a project that attempts to make historical and cultural sense of the rise of a genre of literature in our own time concerned with the "inner world" of brain disorder.

Professor Harrington's courses at Harvard include HS 175,Madness and Medicine, HS 177, Stories under the Skin (the basis for her forthcoming book), HS 176, Evolution and Human Nature, HS 171, Narrative and Neurology, HS 275, The Minded Body (graduate), and HS 278, In Search of Mind (graduate). She also teaches a research methods course for undergraduates, and oversees the department's undergraduate track in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. She is the mother of a fabulous three-year old boy named Jamie.

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