Biosketch
Dr. Rita Charon

Rita Charon is a general internist, literary scholar, and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, New York, NY. She has practiced internal medicine at Columbia for over 20 years, accompanying a patient panel of elderly, poor, sick women of color through much of what has befallen them. In completing a Ph.D. in English at Columbia., Dr. Charon has developed a proficiency as a narratologist, specializing in the works of Henry James. Her research over the years has examined how doctors and patients talk to one another, what happens when doctors permit themselves to write about patients, and how narrative competence can increase the effectiveness of medical care. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Literature and Medicine, co-editor of an anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) on narrative ethics entitled Stories Matte! r: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics, and is now working on a book called Narrative Medicine.