Arthur Kleinman is a physician and anthropologist. A graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Medical School, with a master’s degree in social anthropology from Harvard and trained in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Kleinman is a leading figure in several fields, including medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, global health, social medicine, and medical humanities. A China scholar, since 1978, he has conducted research in China, and in Taiwan from 1969 until 1978.

Kleinman is professor of medical anthropology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the Esther and Sidney Rabb professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and was the Victor and William Fung director of Harvard University’s Asia Center 2008 - 2016. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Arthur Kleinman has published seven single authored books including Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture; Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia and Pain in Modern China; Rethinking Psychiatry; The Illness Narratives; Writing at the Margin; What Really Matters; and The Soul of Care. His four co-authored books include Reimagining Global Health; A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering; and Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person. He has also co-edited books on culture and depression; SARS in China; world mental health; suicide; placebos; AIDS in China; and the relationship of anthropology to philosophy (The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy).

His current collaborative projects include a comparative study of eldercare for dementia in six Asian settings; an ethnographic study of trust in the doctor-patient relationship in China; and social technologies for aging and eldercare in China.

Photo credit: Torben Eskerod

Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group and Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania (PSYS), Honorary Member at IPTAR the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City,  and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen. 

Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press: 2003) winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize,  Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge: 2010) and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference  (Routledge: 2017). She edited two volumes with Manya Steinkoler: Lacan On Madness: Madness Yes You Can't ( Routledge: 2015) and Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press: 2016).  Most recently, she published with Chris Christian Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious  (Winner of the Gradiva Award for best edited collection and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize; Routledge: 2019.)  Her collection (with Manya Steinkoler) Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* was published in November 2022. 

David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and the Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies. He is also Professor in the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory and the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies. After receiving his B.A. in English from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley, he taught at Columbia and Rutgers before joining Penn in 2007. Eng has held visiting professorships at the University of Bergen (Norway), King's College London, Harvard University, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. In 2016, Eng was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. In 2021, he was awarded the Kessler Prize from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS), which is given to a scholar and/or activist who has produced a body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies. His areas of specialization include American studies, Asian American studies, Asian diaspora, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, queer studies, gender studies, and visual culture.

Eng is author of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han, Duke, 2019, winner of the Boyer Book Prize and Association for Asian American Studies Book Award Honorable Mention), The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke, 2010), and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001). He is co-editor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003) and with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple, 1998, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and Association of Asian American Studies Book Award). In addition, he is co-editor of three special issues of the journal Social Text: with Jasbir Puar, "Left of Queer" (2020), with Teemu Ruskola and Shuang Shen, "China and the Human" (2011/2012), and with Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" (2005). His current book project, "Reparations and the Human," investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Cold War Asia. 

At Penn, Eng is a founding convenor of the Faculty Working Group on Race and Empire Studies as well as a member of the Executive Board of Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies and the Alice Paul Center. In 2013-14, he helped to organize a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on "Race, Across Time and Space" sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. Eng is on the Board of Trustees of the Development Fund for the American Studies Association as well as a member of the editorial boards of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Queeries: A Journal of Queer Studies, Social Text, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis, Cultural Studies, Treatment, Research. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and a former Chair of the Board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in New York City.

Françoise Davoine obtained an Agregation in classics (French literature, Latin and Greek) in 1966, followed by a doctorate in sociology in 1981, before becoming a psychoanalyst. She worked for thirty years as a psychoanalyst in public psychiatric hospitals in France, and as an external consultant and is currently in private practice. She was a Professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Movements, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where she and Jean-Max Gaudillière conducted a weekly seminar on 'Madness and the Social Link'. She has also made numerous presentations at the Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts (USA), as well as elsewhere in the US, in England, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Switzerland.

Psychoanalyst in Paris, in private practice, after 30 years in the public psychiatric hospital of Villejuif. At the Social Sciences University, she held with JM Gaudillière a weekly seminar,  “Madness and the Social Link'', combining their clinical work with the exploration of literary works dealing with the madness of war. Member of the ex-Ecole Freudienne of Paris (Jacques Lacan dissolved it before his death in 1981.) PhD in Sociology and Classical studies, with aggregation in classics.

Dr. Leswin Laubscher counts teaching, research, and clinical experience as a psychologist in both the United States and South Africa. He holds degrees from Northwestern University in Evanston, and the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Recent research interests and publications have examined the intersection of culture and psychology, apartheid and psychology, and the importance of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Frantz Fanon for psychology.

Dr. Laubscher serves as the current chairperson of the psychology department at Duquesne. He has also held honorary and external appointments in addition to that at Duquesne, for example at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, and currently as Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Editor of the American Philosophical Association Blog series Black Issues in Philosophy; with Jane Anna Gordon, the book series Global Critical Caribbean Thought; and, also with Jane Anna Gordon, the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs. Areas of specialization: Africana Philosophy, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Science, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Education, Aesthetics and Philosophy in Film, Literature, and Music, Philosophy of Culture, Race, and Racism, Philosophy of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis, and Global Southern Thought.

Lewis Ricardo Gordon (born May 12, 1962) is an American philosopher at the University of Connecticut who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly extensively on Africana and black existentialism, postcolonial phenomenology, race and racism, and on the works and thoughts of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. His most recent book is titled: Fear of Black Consciousness

Professor Volf is the founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. His books include Allah: A Christian Response (2011); Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (2006), which was the Archbishop of Canterbury Lenten book for 2006; Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996), a winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award; and After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (1998), winner of the Christianity Today book award. A member of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. and the Evangelical Church in Croatia, Professor Volf has been involved in international ecumenical dialogues (for instance, with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) and interfaith dialogues (on the executive board of C-1 World Dialogue), and is active participant in the Global Agenda Council on Values of the World Economic Forum. A native of Croatia, he regularly teaches and lectures in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and across North America. Professor Volf is a fellow of Berkeley College.

The Rev. Pamela Cooper-White is Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs, and Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion, at Union Theological Seminary in New York, NY. She holds PhD's from Harvard University and the Institute for Clinical Social Work, Chicago, and is the author of eight books, including "The Psychology of Christian Nationalism: Why People Are Drawn In and How to Talk Across the Divide" (2022), "Old and Dirty Gods: Religion, Antisemitism, and the Origins of Psychoanalysis" (2017), 'Braided Selves: Collected Essays on Multiplicity, God, and Persons' (2011), She also co-authored (with Michael Cooper-White) "Exploring Practices of Ministry" (2014), co-edited (with Felicity Brock Kelcourse) "Sabina Spielrein and the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis" (2019) which was a finalist for the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis' 2020 Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Book. She has published over 70 scholarly and professional articles in pastoral theology, especially in the areas of postmodern, psychoanalytic and feminist theory in dialogue with both theology and clinical practice, and the history of early psychoanalysis and religion.

An Episcopal priest and pastoral psychotherapist, Dr. Cooper-White is a certified National Board Certified Counselor (NBCC), and a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in the State of Illinois. Dr. Cooper-White began her education as an art and music major at Boston University, graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree Magna cum Laude. She went on to earn both a PhD at Harvard University in historical musicology with a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron, and a Master of Divinity with Honors at Harvard Divinity School. Music was a bridge to ministry—she discerned a call to ordained ministry while serving as a church music director.