Rebecca Lester, associate professor of sociocultural anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been appointed the next editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry is an international forum for the publication of work in the fields of medical and psychiatric anthropology, cross-cultural psychiatry, and associated cross-societal and clinical epidemiological studies.
Lester’s current research, which sits at the intersection of anthropology, psychiatry, religion and gender studies, explores how individuals experience existential distress and how this distress manifests as psychiatric symptoms, religious angst, somatic pain and other culturally informed bodily conditions. Her newest book project, forthcoming in fall 2019 from the University of California Press, focuses on the conditions and experience of eating disorders treatment in the United States: “Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America.”
Lester also was recently elected president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Her two-year term will begin in fall 2019.
