Rebecca Lester

I am a Professor of Anthropology and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and a practicing psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, trauma, personality disorders, and self-harm. I received my PhD in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego and completed an NIMH post-doctoral fellowship in Culture and Mental Health at the University of Chicago. After joining the faculty at Washington University, I obtained my Master of Social Work degree at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work.

My academic work sits at the intersections of anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. As an anthropologist, I am interested in the interplay between culture and subjective experience; specifically, how fundamental elements of being such as self, body, other, intersubjectivity, time, affect, and memory are culturally inflected, yet also idiosyncratically emergent within a given person’s life history. My clinical work engages the other side of these issues by working with individuals in the throes of existential crisis, who are struggling to make sense of their suffering, the world, and their places within it.

I am the author of Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent (UC Press, 2005) and Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America (UC Press 2021).