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Columbia University

Columbia University
Medical Center

School of Continuing Education

Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D.
rac5@columbia.edu

Executive Director and Founder, Program in Narrative Medicine

Professor of Clinical Medicine
Department of Medicine
College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University

Rita Charon is Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. A general internist with a primary care practice in Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Charon took a Ph.D. in English when she realized how central is telling and listening to stories to the work of doctors and patients. She directs the Narrative Medicine curriculum for Columbia's medical school and teaches literature, narrative ethics, and life-telling, both in the medical center and Columbia's Department of English. Her literary scholarship focuses on the novels and tales of Henry James. Her research projects center on the outcomes of training health care professionals in narrative competence and the development of narrative clinical routines to increase the capacity for clinical recognition in medical practice. She is currently Principal Investigator on an NIH project to enhance the teaching of social science and behavioral science in medical schools.

Her work in narrative medicine has been recognized by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American College of Physicians, the Society for Health and Human Values, the American Academy on Healthcare Communication, and the Society of General Internal Medicine. She is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residence and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She has published and lectured extensively on the ways in which narrative training helps to increase empathy and reflection in health professionals and students. She is author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness and co-editor of Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine and Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics.

Nellie Hermann, M.F.A.
ngh2101@columbia.edu

Creative Director, Program in Narrative Medicine

Lecturer

Department of Medicine
College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University

Nellie Hermann has a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. from Columbia. Her first novel, The Cure for Grief, has received national acclaim from such publications as Time magazine, The Washington Post, The New
York Times, and others, and was chosen as a Target "breakout" book in August. She won first place in Glimmer Train's Family Matters competition 2008, for a short story that will be published in November of 2009. She teaches writing in the Medical School, in the hospital, and at Barnard College, and teaches a "Narrative Medicine" course for first-year students at Sophie Davis Medical School, a part of City College New York.

Craig Irvine, Ph.D.
ci44@columbia.edu

Academic Director, Program in Narrative Medicine

Academic Director
Master Program in Narrative Medicine
Columbia University

Craig Irvine holds a PhD in Philosophy. He is Assistant Professor in the Center for Family and Community Medicine and Director of Education of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. For more than ten years, he has been designing and teaching cultural competency, ethics, Narrative Medicine, and Humanities and Medicine curricula for residents, medical students, attending physicians, and other health professionals. He has over 20 years of experience researching the history of philosophy, phenomenology, and narrative ethics, and over 25 years of experience teaching ethics, humanities, the history of philosophy, logic, and narrative medicine at the graduate, undergraduate, and preparatory school levels. He has published articles in the areas of ethics, residency education, and literature and medicine and has presented at numerous national and international conferences on these and other topics.

Maura Spiegel, Ph.D.
mls37@columbia.edu

Associate Director, Program in Narrative Medicine

Associate Professor
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University

Faculty

Marsha Hurst, Ph.D.
mh812@columbia.edu

Lecturer
Master Program in Narrative Medicine
Columbia University

Marsha Hurst is on the faculty of Columbia's Narrative Medicine Program and is a research scholar at Columbia University's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, where she is coordinating a faculty seminar on Narrative Genetics. She is also a consultant on health advocacy programs, issues, and education with particular interest in women's health and aging. She has consulted for the Medicare Rights Center and is advisor to their advocacy programs. In addition, Hurst is currently working with the women's health reform coalition, Raising Women's Voices, on a project to help promote the responsible and accountable use of stories by women's health advocates. From 1998 through 2007, Hurst was the director of the graduate program in health advocacy at Sarah Lawrence where she oversaw the remodeling of the master's program to strengthen its focus on promoting and protecting patients' rights, enhancing patient care, and ensuring accessibility to care.

The author of numerous publications, Hurst co-edited, with Sayantani DasGupta, Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, an anthology of women's illness narratives (Kent State University Press, 2007). She is also co-founder and vice president of the Westchester End-of-Life Coalition and a member of the New York State Palliative Care Education and Training Council. Hurst earned a bachelor's degree from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University and completed a National Institute of Mental Health post-doctoral fellowship in community medicine and medical sociology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

Eric R. Marcus, M.D.
erm4@columbia.edu

Director, Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
Department of Psychiatry
Columbia University

Dr. Eric R. Marcus is the Director of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where he is also a training and supervising analyst. He is a clinical professor of psychiatry and social medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, the American College of Psychoanalysts, and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is an elected member of the New York Psychiatric Society and the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies.His teaching awards include the Columbia University President’s Teaching Award, the first Roeske teaching award of the American Psychiatric Association, the Shabshin teaching award of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the regional teaching award of the Association for Academic Psychiatry, and numerous College of Physicians and Surgeons teaching awards including Commencement Speaker. He was for 26 years, the Director of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry and the Behavior Sciences Curriculum at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.

He is a past president of the New York County district branch of the American Psychiatric Association and a past president of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine. He was a counselor-at-large to the executive committee and chair of the University and Medical Education Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association. The author and editor of papers, chapters and books, his book Psychosis and Near Psychosis won the Hartmann Prize of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and is in a revised second edition. His research, going back to his days as a graduate student in cultural anthropology, is on symbolic alterations of reality manifested in medical student dreams about medical school culture and in psychosis. He is interested in symbolic representations as an important organizing function of the ego, elaborated in a modern ego psychology, an area of clinical theory he is developing.

Sayantani Dasgupta, M.D.

sd2030@columbia.edu

Assistant Clinical Professor

Department of Pediatrics

Columbia University

Sayantani DasGupta is an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics and a faculty member of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She also teaches in the graduate program in Health Advocacy at Sarah Lawrence College, and is a prose faculty member in the summer writing conference Writing the Medical Experience at Sarah Lawrence College. Dr. DasGupta is co-author of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales (1995), author of Her Own Medicine: A Woman's Journey from Student to Doctor (1999), and co-editor of Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies (2007). Her work has appeared in journals including The Lancet, JAMA, Pediatrics, The Hastings Center Report, Literature and Medicine, Teaching and Learning in Medicine, and The Journal of Medical Humanities. She is an associate editor of the journal Literature and Medicine, and her current interests are in issues of gender and race in illness narratives, and genomic narratives in film. Dr. DasGupta holds an A.B. from Brown University , and an M.D./M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University.

Patricia Stanley, M.A.
ps2484@columbia.edu

Patient Advocacy
Sarah Lawrence College

Pat Stanley, MBA, MA has an MBA in finance and an MA in Health Advocacy.  She is a faculty member of the Program in Narrative Medicine, serves on the Board of Trustees for Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, NY and is President of the Board of Trustees for the Mt.Pleasant-Blythedale School .  She has three essays published:  “The Patient’s Voice: A Cry in Solitude or a Call for Community ” in Literature and Medicine, (Vol.23, Fall 2004), “The Female Voice in Illness: an Antidote to Alienation, a Call for Connection” in Stories of Illness and Healing:  Women Write Their Bodies, (2007) ed. by Marsha Hurst and Sayantani DasGupta, and “Narrative Palliative Care: A Method for Building Empathy,” coauthored with Marsha Hurst in The Journal of Social Work in End-0f-life & Palliative Care(2011).

Janlori Goldman, J.D., M.F.A
jg2408@columbia.edu

Faculty
Program in Narrative Medicine
Columbia University

Janlori Goldman received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches at Columbia University. She is also a lawyer, with decades of experience as a civil rights advocate, specializing in privacy and health. From 2004-2011, Janlori was faculty at the Center for Medicine as a Profession, and the Mailman School of Public Health, where she taught health advocacy, and health and human rights. She also teaches public health law and ethics at Columbia Law School.

Janlori co-founded the Center for Democracy and Technology in 1994, and founded and directed the Health Privacy Project in 1998. She has published extensively on new technologies and health, and promoting privacy to improve care, and has testified often before the U.S. Congress.

Her poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Calyx, Mudlark, The Sow's Ear, Connotation Press , The Mom Egg, and, Contrary . She co-edited the anthology, For the Crowns of Your Heads: Poems for Haiti.

Ephraim Rubenstein, M.F.A.
eir5@columbia.edu

Faculty
Program in Narrative Medicine
Columbia University

Ephraim Rubenstein is an artist, writer and teacher. He has had over ten one-person exhibitions in New York City- at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Tatistcheff & Co., and most recently, at George Billis Gallery in Chelsea . His work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York .

Mr. Rubenstein has been on the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the University of Richmond . He is currently on the faculty of the Art Students League of New York and the National Academy of Design.