Erin Gentry Lamb, PhD, joined the Department of Bioethics faculty in 2020 to serve as the Faculty Lead of the Humanities Pathway in the School of Medicine and to Direct the undergraduate Bioethics and Medical Humanities minor. Prior to joining CWRU, Dr. Lamb served as the Director of the Center for Literature and Medicine and Herbert L. and Pauline Wentz Andrews Professor of Biomedical Humanities at Hiram College, home to North America’s first baccalaureate major in health humanities.
Dr. Lamb’s key research and teaching interests include aging, death and dying, disability, health care and social justice, new biotechnologies, and pedagogy. Her scholarly work has appeared in such venues as The Journal of Medical Humanities, the Health Humanities Reader, the Disability Bioethics Reader, Keywords for Health Humanities, The International Journal of Aging and Society, Age Culture Humanities, and the Encyclopedia of Health Humanities.
The fields of age studies and health humanities are both still in formation and Dr. Lamb has helped to build key professional organizations in both of these areas. She co-founded the North American Network in Aging Studies (NANAS) in 2013, serving as Co-Chair of the organization for its first five years. She has previously chaired the Age Studies Forum of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the National Women’s Studies Association’s (NWSA) Aging and Ageism Caucus.
In the field of health humanities, Dr. Lamb has served on the Steering Committee of the Health Humanities Consortium (HHC) since its inception in 2015, was the founding co-chair of the HHC’s Curriculum and Assessment Subcommittee, and is the current Co-President (until 2024). She has co-edited the field-defining textbook Research Methods in the Health Humanities (Oxford, 2019) with Craig Klugman and co-authors the comprehensive report on Baccalaureate Health Humanities Programs in the United States with Sarah Berry and Tess Jones. She has additionally served as the chair of the Medical Humanities and Health Studies Forum of the MLA, and has served on the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) Program Planning Committee.