Hannah Zeavin

CSTMS Faculty Affiliate

Lecturer, Department of English
Lecturer, Department of History
University of California, Berkeley
CSTMS Research Unit: Berkeley Program in Science and Technology Studies
Website
hzeavin@berkeley.edu

Hannah Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at UC Berkeley, affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society. Her first book, The Distance Cure: A History of TeleTherapy is forthcoming from MIT Press in August 2021, with a Foreword by John Durham Peters.The Distance Cure is a transnational social history of therapies deployed beyond the classic consulting room. Starting with a reading of epistolary conventions and Freud’s treatments-by-mail, my book shows that tele-therapy, far from being a recent invention, is at least as old as psychoanalysis itself. Subsequent chapters demonstrate that psychotherapy has always operated through multiple communication technologies and media, including the letter, newspaper columns, radio broadcasts, crisis hotlines, the earliest mainframe networks, home computing, and now mobile phones. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU in 2018. Other work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, American Imago, Logic Magazine, and beyond.

last updated: November 9th, 2021