Lindsey Grubbs, PhD

Lindsey Grubbs (she/her) Hecht-Levi Fellow, 2020

Lindsey Grubbs is an assistant professor in the Department of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. Prior to serving as a Hecht-Levi Fellow, she earned a PhD in English from Emory University. As a literary scholar with training in bioethics, she carries out research in both the cultural history and the contemporary ethics of psychiatry and neuroscience. Across disciplines, she examines the role of narrative in the diagnosis, treatment, and social acceptance of controversial and poorly understood illnesses and disabilities. These illnesses—whether psychological, neurological, autoimmune, or mysterious—pose challenges for physicians trying to define and treat them, and for patients negotiating stigmatizing diagnoses. Her research is driven by the conviction that literary analysis provides essential tools for interpreting and clarifying the conceptual and experiential challenges at the boundaries of medical knowledge. Across disciplines, her work is shaped by and intends to contribute to the critical health humanities, a field that extends medical humanities by foregrounding the insights of disability studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, and other critical fields.

Her scholarship has been funded by institutions including the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Philadelphia, and has been published in Literature & Medicine, The Journal of Medical Humanities, The American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience, the Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics, the Cambridge Companion to United States Literature, and the Body, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and other venues. She is particularly interested in first-person writing by people with psychiatric disabilities, and recently edited Under That Calamity, a new edition of John Perceval’s 1838 asylum memoir, A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement, which was published by Lanternfish Press in partnership with the Library Company of Philadelphia.