Hannah Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley and is a faculty affiliate of the University of California at Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and on the Berkeley Center for New Media's Executive Committee. Additionally, she is a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference. Zeavin’s first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy is forthcoming from MIT Press in August 2021, with a Foreword by John Durham Peters. She is at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2023).

Zeavin serves as an Editorial Associate for The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and is a co-founder of The STS Futures Initiative. Other work has appeared in or is forthcoming from American Imago, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Zeavin received her B.A. from Yale University in 2012 and her Ph.D. from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU in 2018. For more information, see Zeavin.org.

Books

The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (with a foreword by John Durham Peters, MIT Press, August 2021).

Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (under contract, MIT Press, expected Spring 2023).

Recent Invited Talks & Keynotes

“The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy,“ Mental Health and Society Book Forum, King’s College London,  April 21,

2021, London, UK.

“Remote Relations: Teletherapy Then & Now,” Grand Rounds, Erikson Institute for Education and Research, Austen Riggs

Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, April 2, 2021.

“Co-Opting AI: Intimacy,” The Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, March 16, 2021.

“Hardware / Software,” Moderator and Discussant, New Histories of Medical Technology, Molina Symposium on the

History of Medicine, March 1, 2021.

“Auto-Intimacy: Algorithmic Therapies and Care of the Self,” The Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing, The

University of Michigan Information School, Ann Arbor, Michigan, February 25, 2021.

“A (Very Brief) History of Teletherapy,” Chaire de recherhce stratégique en

design pour la cybersanté mentale, Montréal, Québec, Canada, February 3, 2021.

“Ethical Implications of Virtual Humans for Health and Social Support,” working group, Robert H. Levi

Leadership Symposium, Johns Hopkins Berman Institute for Bioethics, Baltimore, December 10 and 11, 2020.

“Teletherapy in Crisis,” Keynote, Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Transcultural Psychiatry, Tokyo, Japan,

November 14, 2020.