Jeremy Levenson

Hi! I was born and raised in New Haven by two psychiatrists and amgrateful Yale offered me the opportunity to return home. As an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, I was admitted into medical school via Mount Sinai’s Humanities and Medicine program. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the role of medicine in the Attica Prison Uprising. How and why Attica became a prelude to mass incarceration, and not the transformation in the criminal punishment system that the protesting prisoners envisioned, has been an abiding interest of mine ever since. In medical school, I was a co-leader of Sinai’s Human Rights and Social Justice program. I also began an ethnographic project on solitary confinement at Rikers Island, which inspired me to take a leave and pursue a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at UCLA. My dissertation is an analysis of a program imagined, developed and run by incarcerated men who care for their peers with serious mental illness, and an examination of the entangled histories of mass incarceration and the public mental health system. It draws on the writings of my two heroes, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Frantz Fanon. As a PhD student, I organized with a group of health workers supporting advocacy efforts against the criminal legal system and was part of a successful campaign to stop plans for jail construction in Los Angeles. I also co-taught sessions to undergraduates, medical students and residents on racial essentialism and the health case for prison abolition. My interests include care for people experiencing psychosis, addiction, psychoanalysis, global mental health and the history and political economy of psychiatry. Outside of work, I love everything basketball (but especially the 76ers), early 00sTV, regional Indian cinema, running and exploring alternate food geographies with my partner, an anthropologist of food/media/capitalism.