Justin Suran joins the Department of Anthropology, History & Social Medicine as the J. Elliott Royer Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the History of Health Sciences.
After finishing his degree, he lectured for two years in the Department of History at Berkeley, where he was selected as a Faculty Fellow for the 2003/2004 academic year. He has taught upper-division lecture courses and seminars on the history of science, technology & medicine; U.S. intellectual history; the politics of ethno-racial diversity; and the economic, political, and military influence of America's “power elite.”
Suran is currently completing a manuscript titled Reason's Frontier: The Province of Psychiatry in the 20th-century United States . His book examines the transformation of the San Francisco Bay Area from a backward province of the psychiatric profession into a world-class psychiatric metropolis after World War Two. More generally, he attributes the success of mid-twentieth-century psychiatry to (1) the dynamic interactions between local institutions (e.g., hospitals, medical schools) and catalyzing, translocal phenomena (e.g., the psychoanalytic diaspora of the 1930s, U.S. mobilization for World War Two); (2) the geographic concentration of psychiatrists and their institutions in particular cities; (3) the profession's ability to control certain types of work (i.e., to expand and maintain its professional jurisdiction); and (4) the contributions made by psychiatrists to nonmedical domains, including literary culture, jurisprudence, and public philosophy.
His next project will explore the influence of the U.S. military establishment on the development of medicine since the 1930s |
) Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam," American Quarterly, 53 (Sept. 2001), 452–88.