Medical Humanities Director Lakshmi Krishnan Named a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow
Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan, the founding director of the Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative, has been named a 2026-2027 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow. She will spend the upcoming academic year completing her book, The Doctor and the Detective, about how modern medical diagnosis was forged as much through the literary imagination — particularly detective fiction — as through science.
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration, and Krishnan will be the Jeffrey S. and Margaret Mais Padnos Fellow during her yearlong fellowship there.
“I’m honored to have won a Radcliffe fellowship,” she said. “In any given cohort you might find poets, playwrights, astronomers, mathematicians, historians and literary scholars all in conversation, and I’m deeply honored and excited to be part of that community.”
Krishnan, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center and the Department of English in the College of Arts & Sciences, has a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford and an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She said she came to Georgetown in 2020 in part because she was drawn to the university’s interdisciplinary environment.
“Students gravitate naturally toward work that crosses disciplines,” Krishnan said. “And the faculty are welcoming of it. Many of them are leaders in polyglot thinking and approaches. …It’s part of something I value deeply about Georgetown, which is its commitment to intellectual production in service of social and communal good.”
Her work on the Hilltop spans the history of medicine, literary studies and clinical research, and her interests include diagnostic thinking and clinical reasoning, as well as the pressing problems of diagnostic disparities and the diagnostic error in patient care. Krishnan has also published widely on historical and contemporary pandemics.
“Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan’s scholarship is both exceptional and transformative in that it contributes substantially to both of her academic fields,” said Patrick O’Malley, a professor and chair of the Department of English. “The significant recognition that she has received from prestigious fellowships like that of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute is a testament to the impact of her innovations. Through this fellowship and through her outstanding scholarly research, she is highlighting the interdisciplinary academic excellence of Georgetown’s English department, Medical School and Medical Humanities Initiative in an extraordinary way.”
In her upcoming book, Krishnan hopes that readers will learn a different understanding of where clinical reasoning comes from.
“We tend to think of diagnosis as purely scientific, but it owes as much to narrative imagination as to the scientific method,” she said. “The doctor and the detective emerged as twin figures in the 19th century, and that kinship still shapes how physicians think today.”
(Top photo of Lakshmi Krishnan by Tina Krohn)