Marco Ramos

Marco Antonio Ramos, MD PhD, is a historian, psychiatrist, and Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine and Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. His research focuses on the intersection of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and political imagination across the Americas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His first book Just Dreams: Radical Psychiatry, Terror, and Human Rights in Cold War Argentina (under contract with UNC Press) draws on the personal archives of survivors and physician-activists to recover the radical, if fleeting, visions of an anti-capitalist and liberatory psychoanalysis that “disappeared” amid the fascist terror of the last dictatorship in 1970s Argentina. His award-winning writing has appeared in clinical, academic, and popular journals, including the American Historical Review, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the Boston Review. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Psychiatric Association.

Along with Dr. Ayah Nuriddin, Dr. Ramos is also co-director of the Community Histories Lab (CHL) at Yale School of Medicine. The CHL aims to unearth local histories of New Haven and Yale University that promote justice along the lines of race, class, disability, gender, and sexuality.

Selected Publications:

Articles and Chapters

“Ethics and Ghosts beyond the Institutional Review Board,” in Courtney Thompson and Kylie Smith, eds, Do Less Harm: Ethical Questions for Health Historians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025): 141-150.

“Making Disappearance Visible: The Realities of Cold War Violence” The American Historical Review 127.2 (2022): 664-690.

• A version of this article won the American Association for the History of Medicine Shryock Medal

“”Psychotherapy of the Oppressed”: Anticolonialism and Psychoanalysis in Cold War Buenos Aires” in Anne-Emmanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea (eds.) Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America (Duke University Press, 2020), 211-240.

“Psychiatry, Authoritarianism, and Revolution: The Politics of Mental Illness during Military Dictatorships in Argentina, 1966-1983.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87, no. 2 (2013): 250-278.

Essays

“Mental Illness is not in Your Head,” Boston Review, May 17, 2022.

With Tess Lanzarotta and Iris Chandler, “COVID-19 Is Changing What It Means to Be a Doctor” Boston Review, July 16, 2020.

Media

Interviewed for Connecticut Public Radio’s “Where We Live” on the history of science at Yale University, October 2, 2023, https://www.ctpublic.org/show/where-we-live/2023-10-02/uncovering-the-history-of-eugenics-at-yale-university-and-its-afterlives

Interviewed on Econtalk podcast with Professor Russ Roberts, “Marco Ramos on Misunderstanding Mental Illness,” February 20, 2023, https://www.econtalk.org/marco-ramos-on-misunderstanding-mental-illness/

Interviewed on Flip the Script podcast with Dr. Max Jordan, “Acá y Allá: Protest Psychiatry and Physician Activism,” 2019, https://soundcloud.com/yaleuniversity/aqua-y-alla-protest-psychiatry-and-physician-activism?in=yaleuniversity/sets/flip-the-script