
Nathan Carlin, PhD
- Director
- Samuel E. Karff Chair
- Professor
- Co-director, Clinical Humanities Certificate Program
Biography
The Reverend Dr. Nathan Carlin is the Director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston). Dr. Carlin holds the Samuel Karff Chair and the rank of Professor.
At McGovern Medical School, Dr. Carlin was elected as Chair of the Faculty Senate for 2018-2019, and has an appointment in the Department of Psychiatry. At the UTHealth School of Dentistry, Dr. Carlin co-directs the Clinical Humanities Certificate Program for dental students.
Dr. Carlin’s teaching interests include pathography, physician-writing (especially the fiction of Samuel Shem), mental illness, death and dying, and other topics in medical humanities.
Dr. Carlin has published 9 books, and, in recent years, the focus of his writing has been oriented towards developing core texts for medical humanities. Some sample texts in this regard include Medical Humanities: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press); Teaching Health Humanities (Oxford University Press); Contemporary-Physician Authors: Exploring the Insights of Doctors Who Write (Routledge); and Pathographies of Mental Illness (Cambridge University Press). Currently, Dr. Carlin is writing a monograph (under contract with Oxford University Press) on medicine and secularization.
Education
- Bachelor of Arts
- Westminster College
- Master of Divinity
- Princeton Theological Seminary
- Master of Arts
- Rice University
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Rice University
Areas of Interest
Research Interests
Medical Humanities and Bioethics
Pastoral Theology
Psychology of Religion
Publications
- Carlin, N. (Ed.) (2021). Contemporary physician-authors: Exploring the insights of doctors who write. Routledge.
- Carlin, N. (2020). Correlating bioethics and theology. American Journal of Bioethics, 20(12).
- Carlin, N. (2015). Doctors and Dr. Seuss: Restoring the patient’s voice. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 24(1), 113-119.
- Cole, T. R., Carlin, N., & Carson, R. A. (2014). Medical humanities: An introduction. Cambridge University Press.
- Carlin, N. (2014). Religious mourning: Reversals and restorations in psychological portraits of religious leaders. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
- Cole, T. R., & Carlin, N. (2009). The suffering of physicians. The Lancet, 374(9699), 1414-1415.