Seminar with Lakshmi Krishnan

CRITICAL HEALTH HUMANITIES

SPEAKER: Lakshmi Krishnan, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study / Georgetown University

Lakshmi Krishnan is a physician and literary scholar whose work spans the history of medicine, medical humanities, and the clinic. She is founding director of the Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative, and she holds appointments in Georgetown University’s Departments of Medicine and of English. Her research explores how medical knowledge is constructed and applied, with a focus on diagnosis and clinical reasoning—how doctors think, how diagnostic practices shape professional identity and patient outcomes, and how they intersect with novel technologies, including artificial intelligence.

Krishnan earned a DPhil in English literature from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, an MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and completed internal medicine residency at Duke University and fellowship at Johns Hopkins. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the Academy of Communication in Healthcare, AAMC, Mellon Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities and held visiting positions at Weill Cornell Medicine and Colby College. Her research appears in leading medical and humanities journals and has been featured in outlets including the HISTORY channel, Science News, and STAT.