Lauren Mitchell
Senior Lecturer of Medicine, Health, and Society
Lauren Mitchell is a researcher and direct care practitioner with a current appointment as a Senior Lecturer in the Vanderbilt University Department of Medicine, Health and Society 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, Medicine, and the Use of Discomfort 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.
Specializations
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
Book Chapter: “Sirenomelia, Sirenophelia and the Display Culture of Agnieszka Smoczynska’s The Lure.” In The Deep: A Companion Edited by Simon Bacon (2023)
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.