Dr. Linda Barnes is a medical anthropologist and a scholar in the study of world religions. She is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Family Medicine and Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine, and a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research and teaching interests involve the intersections of culture, religion and spirituality, and complementary and alternative therapies. She is committed to including an understanding of the healing practices of culturally complex patient populations in the training of clinicians, and to helping clinicians better understand how religious worldviews play a part in patient and family understandings of illness and healing.

Dr. Barnes received her BA from Smith College, following which she earned her Masters in Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in Comparative Religion and the allied field of Medical Anthropology. As an historian and medical anthropologist, her own research expertise is in the social history of Western responses to Chinese healing traditions, in relation to histories of race, medicine, and religion.

She has taught courses on religiously-grounded healing traditions at Harvard University, Harvard Divinity School, Brown University, and Northeastern University, and has received multiple teaching awards for her work with students. She currently teaches and mentors medical students, residents, fellows, and faculty at BUSM. She also co-teaches a course at Harvard Medical School (HMS), through the Department of Social Medicine with Drs. Daniel Goodenough, Irving Allen, and Roxana Llerena-Quinn for first and second year medical students on the cultural formation of the physician and its implications for medical practice.

For ten years, Dr. Barnes also served as the consultant to faculty-development workshops, sponsored by the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and funded by the Lilly Endowment, the Luce Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanitites, for faculty in the study of religion. She is currently the Regional Director of the New England/Maritimes Region of the American Academy of Religion, and founded and chairs the consultation "Religions, Medicines, and Healing," at the national level of the AAR.

Her books include Religion and Healing in America (co-edited with Susan S. Sered, Oxford 2005); Teaching Religion and Healing (co-edited with Ines Talamantez, Oxford 2006); and Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848.

Dr. Barnes lives with her husband, three parrots, canary, and cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Curriculum Vitae (.pdf)