Lauren Mitchell
Lecturer
Lauren Mitchell is a researcher and direct care practitioner with a current appointment as a Lecturer in the Vanderbilt University Department of English and through the Columbia University Narrative Medicine Certificate of Professional Achievement Program. She is the founder of The Doula Project, the United States' first formalized full-spectrum doula program, and is the author of the book The Doulas: Radical Care for Pregnant People (Feminist Press 2016). Her first academic book project, Alienating Aesthetics: Performance Art and the Medical Imagination, contends with the ethics of visual and performance culture, narrative, medical history, and the limitations of our current societal definition of empathy. She has recently published in Configurations, Departures in Critical Qualitative Interventions, and The Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, and has held a faculty position at Texas Christian University. She is also pursuing a Master's in Social Work at the University of Tennessee at this time.
Specialization(s)
Medical Humanities, Performance Studies, Gender Studies, 20th Century Visual Culture, Narrative Medicine, Medical History, Ethics, Affect Studies, Trauma Studies, Reproductive Justice, Oral History; Ongoing interests in Qualitative Research Analysis, Narrative Therapy, and Practical Approaches to Psychoanalysis, Bioethics
Representative publications
Forthcoming:
Book Chapter: “Sirenomelia, Sirenophelia and the Display Culture of Agnieszka Smoczynska’s The Lure.” Book title TBA. Edited by Simon Bacon (2022)
Article: “Viewpoints and the Performance of Force in William Carlos Williams,” The William Carlos Williams Review Special Issue: Williams and Medicine (2022). Co-authored with Chase Crossno.
Published:
Article: “Erotic Surgery: J.G. Ballard’s Crash and Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’ and the Visual Legacy of the Medical Museum,” Configurations Special Issue: Science Fiction and the Museum (2022)
Article: “Finding the Story in Research,” Journal of Clinical and Translational Science (2022). Co-authored with Evonne Kaplan-Liss, Val Lantz-Gefroh, and Chase Crossno.
Article: “Soft Animal Heart: Building and Losing Family Across Species,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research Special Issue: Who is a Good Death For? (2021).
Contributing Writer: Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal (2018-2020)
Ongoing short articles for online Medical Humanities journal through Columbia University. Articles include, “Reading Neurotica: Or, the Caregiver and Her Heartache”; “A for Abortion: The Weaponized Vocabulary of a Medical Procedure”; “Medicine, Myth, Fairytale: Joanna Pearson’s Every Human Love’”; “Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation”: Uncanny Neuroscience and Radical Self-Exam”
Book Chapter: “Connections in Obstetrics and Gynecology: Using Reflective Writing to Engage in Healthcare for Women” in From Reading to
Healing: Teaching Medical Professionalism Through Literature. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2019). Co-authored with Abigail Winkel and Stephanie Blank.
Book Chapter: “The Trauma of Second Birth: Double Consciousness, Rupture, and The Ethics of Reading in Toni Morrison's Beloved” in Toni Morrison and Motherhood (Ontario, Canada: Demeter Press, 2017).
Book Chapter: “Story-Centered Care: Full-Spectrum Doula Work and Narrative Medicine” in Intimate Care: Doulas and the Birthing Body. (Ontario, Canada: Demeter Press, 2015). Co-authored with Annie Robinson.
Awards
- Claudia V. Camp Creativity in Research Award in Women’s and Gender Studies, Texas Christian University, November 2020
- Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award, Vanderbilt University College of Arts and Sciences, December 2018
- Graduate Student Fellowship, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, 2018-2019 Academic Year
- Summer Research Award, Vanderbilt University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Summer 2018
- Robert Manson Myers Award for best first chapter of a dissertation in the English Department at Vanderbilt University, January 2018