Deborah Jenson

Professor, Romance Studies (French)

Research Professor, Global Health

Deborah Jenson Duke headshot

Contact

deborah.jenson@duke.edu

(919) 660-3122

205 Languages, Box 90527, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708

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Deborah Jenson

Professor, Romance Studies (French)

Research Professor, Global Health

Deborah Jenson is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar whose work in Global Health draws on language, cultural, and historical expertise, with a focus on Haiti and the francophone Caribbean, Africa, and France. At Duke she has directed the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and has co-directed the Brain & Society Bass Connections theme. She co-founded and co-directed the Haiti Lab, the Neurohumanities Research Group, and the Health Humanities Lab.

Dr. Jenson's Global Health courses include Pandemic Humanities, Trauma and Global Mental Health in Haiti, Ethnopsychiatry in Haiti, and Narratives of Illness & Healing, and Storytelling in Medicine and Health. She recently co-taught with Duke Professor Felwine Sarr a course on Contemporary African Philosophy. She recently co-edited with Marco Iacoboni and Len White a Frontiers in Neuroscience Research Topic on "Representation in Neuroscience and Humanities". An article on Haitian psychiatrist Louis Mars, “La Lutte Continue: Louis Mars and the Genesis of Haitian Ethnopsychiatry” with Evan Auguste et al, is forthcoming from  American Psychologist. Other recent STEM-related publications include "Conversational Analysis of Consciousness During Seizures" in Epilepsy & Behavior,  "Thank This Ebola-Fighting African Doctor for Monoclonal Antibody Treatments" (for Covid-19) in StatNews, and, With Nirmala Ramanujam et al, (2019), "A Novel, Versatile Speculum-free Callascope for Clinical Examination and Self-Visualization of the Cervix," Sci Rep. 2020 Oct 6;10(1):16570.doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-72219-9 Other health-related publications include a co-edited book with Warwick Anderson and Richard Keller on global legacies of psychoanalysis (Unconscious Dominions). Her Emerging Infectious Diseases article on why and how Haiti had avoided cholera until its unintentional introduction by UN forces after the Haitian earthquake of 2010 has been influential.  She is currently working on a book on Caribbean and Latin American philosophical engagement with brain science and psychiatry, tentatively called Minding Modernity.

 

Publications