George Makari

Historian, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist George Makari is the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts, and Professor of Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College, where for over two decades he has led efforts to integrate humanistic scholarship into mind/brain medicine and science. His latest book, Of Fear and Strangers:  A History of Xenophobia (W.W Norton, 2021) was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Prize, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a Bloomberg Book of the Year. It was preceded by two widely acclaimed and award-winning histories, Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (W.W Norton, 2015) and Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (HarperCollins, 2008). His books have been or are being translated into eleven languages and their findings have been the subject of eight symposia. His essays have appeared in many venues including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Raritan, the New York Times, and the New England Journal of Medicine, as well as in psychiatric journals. The recipient of numerous honors, Dr. Makari was presented with the Benjamin Rush Award from the American Psychiatric Association. A graduate of Brown University, Cornell University Medical College, and the Columbia University’s Psychoanalytic Center, he is presently a Guest Investigator at Rockefeller University and a faculty member of Columbia’s Psychoanalytic institute. He lives with his family in New York City.