Arthur Kleinman, MD
Arthur Kleinman, MD, author of The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor (Penguin/Viking 2019), is one of the most renowned and influential scholars and writers on psychiatry, anthropology, global health, health and medicine in China, and cultural and humanistic issues in health and medicine. Educated at Stanford University and Stanford Medical School, Kleinman has taught at Harvard for 50 years. He is currently a professor of global health and social medicine and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He has been the Victor and William Fung Director of Harvard University’s Asia Center (2008 – 2016); Chair, Department of Social Medicine (1990-2000); and Chair, Department of Anthropology (2004-2007). Kleinman is the author of six other books, including Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture; Rethinking Psychiatry; The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition; and What Really Matters. His co-authored volumes include Reimagining Global Health with the late Paul Farmer and Jim Kim, his former students, as well as A Passion for Society with Iain Wilkinson. He is the co-editor of 29 volumes, the founding editor of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and the author or co-author of more than 350 journal articles and book chapters. He was the senior editor of the first World Mental Health Report, Director of the Out of the Shadows Report on Mental Health for the World Bank, and editor of the Fall 2023 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, on Mental Health. Kleinman is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past member of NIH’s Council of the Fogarty International Center and Council of Councils. Amongst his awards are the Franz Boas Award from the American Anthropological Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Tanner Lectures (which he delivered at Stanford in 1998), an Honorary Doctorate from York University in Canada, and election to Honorary Academician of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He has also received the Magnolia Award from the city of Shanghai. He is a Distinguished Lifetime Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Kleinman currently directs a project on Social Technology for Global Aging and Eldercare in China at Harvard that involves faculty and students from six of Harvard's schools as well as several of his former students who are now professors in China. Kleinman has mentored more than 100 PhD students, more than 250 postdoctoral fellows, hundreds of medical students, and thousands of undergraduates in his 50 years at Harvard.