Ruby Lark Mendelsund is a second-year PhD candidate in Columbia's department of English and Comparative Literature. Her work addresses questions of selfhood and consciousness in the modernist period (with a particular focus on the role of psychoanalysis), as well as literary representations of illness, affect theory, and pain. She is interested in how writing can or cannot aid in the task of self-articulation, especially when selfhood and language are made unstable by mental illness.
As an undergraduate, she was a student in the Medical Humanities department at Columbia, and was awarded the Catherine Medalia Johannet prize for her senior thesis, "Constructions and Reconstructions of Silence in the Oralist Movement and the d/Deaf World." She has conducted research in Neuropathology and Astrophysics, was a medical assistant in a pediatrics clinic, and worked in the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital.
