Rishi Goyal, MD, PhD is Director of the Medical Humanities major at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University and an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Professor Goyal completed his residency in Emergency Medicine as Chief Resident while finishing his PhD in English and Comparative Literature. His research interests include the health humanities, the study of the novel, and medical epistemology. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning, Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. He is a Co Founding Editor of the online journal, Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, Co-founding Director of the Health Language Lab, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. He most recently co-edited the volume, Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities from Bloomsbury Press.