Anne Harrington
Areas of Research: History of Medicine, Human Sciences, Medical Humanities, Psychiatry and Mental Health, Mind-Body Medicine, Neuroscience, Consciousness Studies
Anne Harrington is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science, specializing in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind and behavioral sciences. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Oxford University. Prior to arriving at Harvard, she held postdoctoral fellowships at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and the University of Freiburg in Germany. She has served as Department Chair (2007-2010, 2012-13), and was also Director of Undergraduate Studies for more than a decade (2010-22). In 2024, she was Acting Director of Graduate Studies and starting in the fall of 2025, she will return as Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Interdisciplinary collaboration across science and the humanities has been an important goal of her work as a scholar for many years. For six years, she co-directed Harvard's Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative. For seven years, she was a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interaction. She served for 12 years on the Board of the Mind and Life Institute, dedicated to collaboration between the sciences and various contemplative traditions. She was also a founding co-editor of Biosocieties, a journal concerned with social science approaches to the life sciences.
As a professor and campus citizen, Professor Harrington has invested a great deal of energy in supporting undergraduate academic and residential life at Harvard. From 2013-23, she was Faculty Dean of Pforzheimer House. From 2019-23, she was also Chair of the Faculty Dean Leadership Council, and chaired meetings of the Faculty Deans. In 2022-23, she was appointed Acting Dean of Undergraduate Education for Harvard College, during which time she developed a new Certificate for Civic Engagement program and took the lead in inaugurating a new program for entering Harvard students, the Harvard College Rising Scholar Program. In 2023-24, she was a Special Advisor to the College, working to develop a new concentration initiative for future students focused on interdisciplinary training in the area of environment, climate and sustainability.
Professor Harrington is the author of four books: Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain (1987), Reenchanted Science (1997) and The Cure Within; A History of Mind-Body Medicine (2008), and Mind Fixers: Biology’s Troubled Search for The Biology of Mental Illness (2019) 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 book, with the (very tentative) title: Science and the Quest for Sentience
Courses:
- CB 34: Madness and Medicine: Themes in the History of Psychiatry
- History of Science 170: Broken Brains: A Patient-Centered History
- History of Science 97: Sophomore tutorial
- History of Science 172: Mental Health Matters: Recurring Themes and Unfinished Business
- History of Science 1771: Science and the Quest for Consciousness
Book Publications:
- Science and the Quest for Sentience (in progress)
- Mind Fixers
- The Cure Within
- The Dalai Lama at MIT
- Reenchanted Science
- The Placebo Effect
- Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain
Selected Public Talks & Interviews