Marsha Hurst

Marsha Hurst, Ph.D., is a member of the faculty of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, where she teaches in the masters degree program in Narrative Medicine. At Columbia she is Co -Chair of the University Seminar on Narrative, Health, and  Social Justice. Her research and advocacy interests are in women’s health, aging, and end of life care. She sits on the New York State Palliative Care Education and Training Council and is founding Vice President and member of the Board of the Westchester End-of-Life Coalition.

Dr. Hurst is on the Advisory Boards of the Medicare Rights Center (Westchester Programs), the Center for Aging in Place Support (CAPS) Health Advocacy Project and the national women’s health reform coalition, Raising Women’s Voices. From 1998 through 2007 Dr. Hurst was the Director of the Graduate Program in Health Advocacy at Sarah Lawrence. There she oversaw the remodeling of the master’s program to educate health advocates to promote and protect patients’ rights, enhance the quality of patient care and ensure their ability to access that care, and to work toward changes in the health care system that will benefit all. She is co-editor with Sayantani DasGupta, MD, MPH, of Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, an anthology of women’s illness narratives (Kent State University Press, 2007).

She has a Ph.D. (political science) from Columbia University, an A.B. from Brown University, and was an NIMH Post-Doctoral Fellow in Community Medicine and Medical Sociology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.