Wesleyan portrait of Charles  Barber

Charles Barber

Professor of the Practice in Letters

Boger Hall Room 313, 41 Wyllys Avenue
860-685-3104

cmbarber@wesleyan.edu

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BA Harvard University
MFA Columbia University

Charles Barber

Charles Barber is a nonfiction author who writes about contemporary healthcare and criminal justice issues, for both popular and scholarly audiences. 

Charles Barber is the author of five nonfiction books:  Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation (Random House, 2008), Citizen Outlaw: One Man's Journey from Gangleader to Peacekeeper (HarperCollins, 2019), Peace & Health: How a Group of Small-Town Activists and College Students Set Out to Change Healthcare (OctoberWorks, 2022);  and In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Miracle and took on the U.S. Army (Grand Central, 2023).  His work has appeared in The New York TImes, The Washington Post, The Nation, Salon, and Scientific American MIND, as well as in scholarly journals and books on psychiatry and criminology.  Before becoming a full-time writer and a teacher, he worked for many years with the homeless in New York City and in the corrections system in Connecticut. 

He has a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. 

Academic Affiliations

Office Hours

By appointment. 

Courses

Fall 2024
COL 227 - 01
Life Writing

COL 301 - 01
Historical Nonfiction

Spring 2025
COL 200 - 01
Narratives Illness & Recovery

COL 246 - 01
Senior Colloquium 2