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

He 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 a regular contributor to Psychology Today.

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