Laura Wittman

Laura Wittman is Associate Professor of French and Italian Literature and Culture at Stanford University, where she co-chairs the Workshop in Medical Humanities housed at the Stanford Humanities Center. She works at the intersection of literature, history, religion, and medicine, and has written on wartime literature and the historical evolution of trauma, grief, recovery, and spiritual meaning. Her book, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body (University of Toronto Press, 2011) was awarded the Marraro Award of the Society for Italian Historical Studies for 2012, and has been translated into Italian as Il Milite Ignoto: Storia e Mito (LEG, 2021). She is currently finishing a project on modern rewritings of the Biblical Lazarus story or resurrection, as a window into our modern understandings, images, and anxieties around death and how to accompany the dying. Her most recent work explores grief and memorials in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular seeking a deeper understanding of how commemoration and its politics can foster or hinder the recovery of a specific community.