Anne Harrington, PhD, is Professor and Acting Chair of the History of Science at Harvard University, specializing in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind and behavioral sciences. Professor Harrington received her PhD 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. She also was a consultant for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interactions. She is also a former founding editor of Biosocieties, a journal concerned with social science approaches to the life sciences. Professor Harrington is the author of three books: Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain (1987), Reenchanted Science (1997) and The Cure Within; A History of Mind-Body Medicine (2008) 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 working on a new history of psychiatry, The Suffering Mind, and developing a new project concerned with how culture shapes illness experiences. Other research interests include the history of scientific interests in the “inner world” of brain disorder; and the origins and larger significance of current visions of partnership between Buddhism and science.
Harrington served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 1998 to 2011.
