Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry - Introducing the New Editor-in-Chief

Dr. Rebecca J. Lester

Dr. Lester is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and a practicing psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, trauma, personality disorders, and self-harm. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego and completed an NIMH post-doctoral fellowship in Culture and Mental Health at the University of Chicago. After joining the faculty at Washington University, she obtained her Master of Social Work degree at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work.Dr. Lester’s academic work sits at the intersections of anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. As an anthropologist, she is interested in the interplay between culture and subjective experience; specifically, how fundamental elements of being such as self, body, other, intersubjectivity, time, affect, and memory are culturally inflected, yet also idiosyncratically emergent within a given person’s life history. Her clinical work engages the other side of these issues by working with individuals in the throes of existential crisis, who are struggling to make sense of their suffering, the world and their places within it.Dr. Lester's second book, Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.