Faculty

Elizabeth Lunbeck
Nelson Tyrone, Jr Chair of American History
Chair, Department of History
Professor of Psychiatry

PhD, Harvard, 1984

History of psychiatry and psychoanalysis; history of the human sciences; women and gender; twentieth-century US cultural and intellectual history.

Telephone:  615-322-3372
Email: elizabeth.lunbeck@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: Email for an appointment.
Office: Benson Hall 234

Elizabeth Lunbeck is a historian of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the United States and Europe, with allied interests in women and gender, intellectual and cultural history, and the twentieth-century United States.  She is the author of The Psychiatric Persuasion:  Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton 1994, 1996), which traces psychiatry’s early-twentieth-century transformation from a discipline concerned primarily with insanity to one equally concerned with normality, as focused on normal persons and their problems as on the insane; it was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Morris D. Forkosch Prize, and the History of Women in Science Prize.  With the psychoanalyst Bennett Simon she wrote Family Romance, Family Secrets (Yale 2003), which focuses on an earliest surviving account of a psychoanalytic treatment of hysteria.  Professor Lunbeck has also co-edited three additional volumes, most recently Science without Laws:  Model Systems, Cases and Exemplary Narratives, with Angela Creager and Norton Wise (Duke 2007).  At present she is completing The Americanization of Narcissism, which examines the consolidation of narcissism as a clinical category and as cultural critique.  Grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Charles Warren Center, among others, have funded her research and writing.

In her capacity as Chair of the American Historical Association’s Committee on Women Historians, Professor Lunbeck prepared the 2005 report, The Status of Women in the Historical Profession (http://www.historians.org/governance/cwh/2005Status/index.cfm).  She has spoken widely on gender issues—both historical and current—in the profession.  With Emily Martin of NYU and Louis Sass of Rutgers, she directs The Psyences Project, a regional seminar on the “psy” disciplines (http://www.nyu.edu/fas/ihpk/Psyences/PsyencesSP2006.htm), and currently serves as  History of Psychiatry editor of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry. 

Professor Lunbeck has taught widely in the history of the human sciences, of women and gender, and of the modern US.  She comes to Vanderbilt from Princeton University, where she taught for 18 years and, from 2004 to 2006, served as Master of Forbes College. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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