Alan S. Weber, PhD

Professor of English,
Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar

Dr. Alan S. Weber, PhD, has taught literature and the Medical Humanities–including the history, philosophy and sociology of medicine and Islamic Medical Ethics–at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar for the past fourteen years. He has held previous appointments at Cornell University, the State University of New York, and the Pennsylvania State University. His cross-disciplinary dissertation Shakespeare’s Cosmology (1996) examined Shakespeare’s relationships with early modern natural philosophy and medicine. He is the author of a widely used textbook on the history of science and medicine, 19th Century Science (2000) and managed the history of science journal Isis. He has published over 170 articles, books, and book chapters in a wide variety of fields, including e-learning, education, literature and medical history. He has directed a number of narrative medicine and medical humanities projects in Qatar at the national level, including a public brochure on Health Website Reliability, an Arabic/English book of patient education cancer survivor stories for the Qatar Cancer Society, a QNRF nationally-funded research project on Literature and Medicine, six volumes of medical student essay writing, and the first cross-disciplinary Art and Medicine undergraduate course in the Persian Gulf (with Stephen Scott, M.D.). He conducted an interventional educational trial on the use of graphic novels in medical ethics teaching in 2015. He has organized and Co-Directed eleven ACCME-accredited workshops on integrating the health humanities into clinical practice at WCM-Q. He was the lead organizer of the 1^st and 2^nd International Conferences on the Medical Humanities in the Middle East and also organized two national conferences on the teaching of English in Qatar in 2009-2010 as well as the 1^st Conference on Healthcare Communications in the Middle East in 2020. His research on Internet Health websites in the Middle East won first prize in 2015 in the Qatar National Research Fund’s annual research competition, and he serves as the Qatar National Representative for the International Association for Communication in Healthcare (EACH). He has also published base-line studies on medical education, provider-patient relations and communication in Qatar. He contributed a chapter to a collection that won the 2017 Outstanding Book Award from the U.S. National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). He is currently developing national and international Arts in Health programs.orkshops on the medical humanities at WCM-Q.