We’re excited to welcome Joelle Abi-Rached from American University of Beirut to give our next SPIRIT speaker series talk.

The title of Dr. Abi-Rached’s talk is “The Tyranny of Resilience.”

Joelle M. Abi-Rached, MD, MSc, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of the American University of Beirut, with a secondary appointment in the Department of History and Archaeology. An interdisciplinary social scientist of medicine, she is trained as a medical doctor, philosopher, and historian of science. Abi-Rached is an award-winning educator, who has taught at Harvard and Columbia University. Her research has appeared in leading academic journals, including Nature Medicine, The Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine, as well as in publications such as Aeon, the Boston Review, and Le Monde. Her work has also been covered by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Al Jazeera, and others, and has been translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, and Japanese. She is the author of ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East (MIT Press, 2020) and, with Nikolas Rose, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (Princeton University Press, 2013) and co-editor of a forthcoming book Lebanon: Anatomy of a Collapse (under contract with Hurst Publishers). Abi-Rached has received prestigious awards and fellowships, including from Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she was the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow in 2023–2024. She has been appointed Associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University for 2024–2025. She holds an MD from the American University of Beirut, an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University.