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 Co-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 or is forthcoming in 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, and continues to serve on the Governing Council as chair of the Membership Committee. 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 and was the founding co-chair of the HHC’s Curriculum and Assessment Subcommittee. 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 is the outgoing chair of the Medical Humanities and Health Studies Forum of the MLA, and will be serving as chair of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) Program Planning Committee in 2020-2021.