Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Abi-Rached is Associate Professor of Medicine at the American University of Beirut, primarily affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine (Department of Internal Medicine) with a secondary affiliation at the Department of History and Archaeology. She is the Founding Director of a new Program on Medical History, Ethics & Politics. She is also Associate Faculty at the Department of History of Science at Harvard University.

Her research focuses on the politics of life, health, and wealth. Her interests and perspective lie at the intersection of history, philosophy, ethics, medicine, global health and policy. She has a particular interest in the history of psychiatry in its local and global iterations, the history of medicine more broadly speaking, and in the politics of health as it plays out in low- and middle-income countries or the so-called “Global South”.

Abi-Rached is an award-winning educator who has taught courses on war and medicine, global health, and the history of psychiatry at Harvard and Columbia universities. She has mentored students with diverse interests, ranging from neuroscience and cellular and molecular biology to social studies, global health, and health policy, as well as government, economics, the history of science, history, philosophy, and literature. She is currently developing new courses on critical perspectives in the medical humanities and social sciences at the American University of Beirut.

She has received numerous grants, awards, and fellowships including from Columbia University’s Society of Fellows (2017-2019), Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2023-2024), and most recently from the Open Society Foundation (2025-2026) to support her new book, which revisits the concept of trauma in an age of crisis. She has been an invited researcher at the École normale supérieure, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales as well as Sciences Po in Paris.

Her research has appeared in such high-profile journals as Nature Medicine, Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine and in publications such as Aeon, the Boston Review, Libération and Le Monde. Her work was featured in many leading media outlets, magazines, and newspapers, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, the Harvard Gazette, Le Monde, Al-Jazeera, the Gaceta Médica, El Espectador, among others. Her work has been translated into Arabic, French, Japanese, and Spanish.

She is the author of ‘Asfuriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East (MIT Press, 2020), co-author of Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (Princeton University Press, 2013), and co-editor of the forthcoming book Lebanon: Anatomy of a Collapse (under contract with Hurst and Oxford University Press).

Abi-Rached was trained as a physician, philosopher, and historian of medicine. She holds a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University, an M.D. from the American University of Beirut, and an M.Sc. in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics.