Christopher Lane (PhD, University of London) taught Victorian studies, medical humanities, and the history of medicine at Northwestern until his retirement in 2022 at age 56. A former Guggenheim fellow, awarded the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, with a previous appointment at Emory University, he specializes in 19th- and 20th-century psychology, psychiatry, and intellectual history. He has held Northwestern’s Pearce Miller Research Professorship and remains a member of the university’s Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Feinberg School of Medicine.

Lane is the author of six books, most recently Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (Yale, 2016), on Peale’s self-described “religio-psychiatric” clinic and movement in the 1950s. His other books include The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, 2011), on the history of agnosticism and unbelief, and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), translated into six languages, on behind-the-scenes changes to the DSM and the creation of the anxiety disorders between the 1970s and 1990s.

Lane’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Slate, TIME, Huffington Post, Chronicle Review, Daily Beast, and several other newspapers and magazines. He has also contributed more than fifty articles to journals such as Raritan, Novel, Victorian Studies, Common Knowledge, Theory and Psychology, and the International Literary Quarterly.

He is the recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the British Academy, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and is a regular contributor to Psychology Today.

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