Maura Spiegel

Maura Spiegel specializes in contemporary fiction, film, and narrative theory. She is a founder and co-director of the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where she teaches a film course to first-year medical students. She has lectured on Narrative Medicine in Venice, London, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Calgary, Tampere, Finland, Baroda, India, and in many cities around the U.S.  She co-authored The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press), which has been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Greek and Polish; The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying and Living on (Anchor/Doubleday), The Breast Book: An Intimate and Curious History (Workman), which was a Book-of-the-Month Club-Quality Paperbacks selection. She edited and introduced new editions of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes for the Barnes & Noble Classics Series.  With Rita Charon, MD, PhD, she edited the journal Literature and Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press) for seven years.  She has written for The New York Times, Newsday, The British Film Institute, and has published articles on the history of the emotions, Charles Dickens, Victorian fashion, diamonds in the movies, among many other topics.  She is writing a monograph on the films of Sidney Lumet (Columbia University Press), and her book, Sidney Lumet: A Life (St. Martin’s Press) was published in 2019.