These are the regular contributors to Somatosphere.  A list of guest contributors can be found here.

 

Kalman Applbaum teaches medical anthropology and global studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research has concerned the marketing, prescribing and use of psychiatric medicines in the US and Japan.

Sultana Banulescu is a PhD candidate in History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She holds an MA degree in History of Science from Princeton University, an MS degree in Physiology and Biophysics from the University of Iowa, an MD degree from Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, Romania, and a BS degree in Biochemistry from the University of Bucharest. Sultana’s dissertation explores the political, religious, and artistic dynamics of Italian psychoanalysis between 1908 and 1948. Her research interests include modern European history, cultural and intellectual history, history of science and medicine, and medical humanities.

Melanie Boeckmann holds a BA in Public Health and an MA degree in African and American Studies. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Public Health at the University of Bremen, Germany. Melanie is broadly interested in interconnectedness of climate change and health, anthropologies of food and nutrition as well as health in situations of conflict.

Lara Braff received her PhD from the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development in 2010. She is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD. Her ethnographic research examines the cultural implications and lived experiences of globalized biosciences – namely, assisted reproductive technologies and genetic sciences – in Mexico. Her broader research interests include the anthropologies of medicine/health, science/technology, gender/kinship, personhood, and the body.

Amy Cooper is a PhD candidate in the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development. Her research interests include medicine, political activism, everyday life, embodiment, and governmentality, with a focus on Latin America (particularly Venezuela and Cuba).

Talia Dan-Cohen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work concerns the intersection of engineering and biology in the field of synthetic biology. Her interests include epistemology and the anthropology of knowledge, technical expertise, rationalities and aesthetics, and the explorations — empirical and theoretical — of problems in the philosophy of science.

Cassandra Hartblay is a PhD student in Medical Anthropology at the University of North-Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation research considers disability and citizenship in post-Soviet Russia. The project focuses on the discourses deployed by parent-activists lobbying for inclusive education in the Western city of Petrozavodsk and the Siberian region of Buryatia, and is concerned with resituating Soviet rehabilitation, exclusion and (self-)discipline in the broader context of twentieth century regimes of productivity.

Ann Kelly is a Lecturer in the Global Health Department, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Cambridge University. In collaboration with the Anthropologies of African Biosciences Group (AAB), her ethnographic fieldwork in Tanzania, Benin and The Gambia explores the production of scientific facts in Africa, with special attention to the built-environments, material artefacts and practical labours of experimentation. A second focus is on malaria control interventions, how rural and urban spaces are configured to manage the flow of human, parasite and mosquito populations. She is currently beginning a project exploring the genres of memory and mobility among municipal health-workers in African cities.

Klaartje Klaver is a PhD candidate in the research group Ethics of Care at Tilburg University, NL. Her work concerns an empirical study of ‘attentiveness’ in (hospital) care. Klaartje holds a Master’s degree in both medical anthropology and pedagogical sciences, and is also more broadly interested in professional and informal care practices, transcultural (mental) health care, health systems, family forms, hospital ethnography, and illness experience.

Erin Koch: I am an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. My research and teaching interests include anthropological studies of medicine, science and technology; infectious disease; humanitarianism; postsocialism; and anthropological theories and methods. I am completing a book manuscript titled Free Market Tuberculosis: Managing Medicine in the Republic of Georgia. I examine the effects of Soviet collapse on tuberculosis and responses to tuberculosis in Georgia, and what counts as expert knowledge in the face of WHO-directed biomedical standardization. My current research in Georgia investigates health effects of displacement and humanitarian interventions. I am interested in how health care, policy and aid organizations produce moral claims to organize institutions, social spaces, and diagnoses as they bring relief—and distress—to displaced populations. My subsequent project will examine Georgian scientific innovation in the use of bacteriophage treatments to combat bacterial infections in humans. This research will investigate how infectious diseases and responses to them are produced through dynamic human-microbe relationships in which moral claims about infected populations, national health care systems, global health policies, and the commodification and regulation of living entities (viruses) as antibacterial agents are contested and negotiated.

Stephanie Lloyd is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. She is a medical anthropologist whose research and teaching focus on transnationalism and the migration of medical categories and practices as they are translated linguistically, socially and culturally. She grounds her work in ethnographic research in France and Canada on the global spread and local interactions of psychiatric technologies with local and regional cultures, social change, policies and histories.

Zhiying Ma is a PhD student at the Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago. She is interested in the development of Chinese psychiatry, especially its imagination of and intervention into domesticity, gender, and sexuality. Her dissertation research focuses on the intersection of psychiatry and family in caring for patients diagnosed with psychosis.

Rebecca Marsland is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

Todd Meyers is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at Wayne State University. He received a joint Ph.D. in anthropology and population, family, & reproductive health sciences from the Johns Hopkins University in 2009. With Stefanos Geroulanos, he edits the Forms of Living book series at Fordham University Press, and has most recently completed a translation (with Stefanos Geroulanos) of Georges Canguilhem’s Writings on Medicine (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2011) and Georges Canguilhem’s Knowledge of Life (Fordham University Press, 2008). Todd is the Book Reviews Editor for Somatosphere.

Neely Myers received her PhD from the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development in August 2009. Her research interests include medical and psychological anthropology, schizophrenia and severe mental illnesses, cross-cultural strategies for mental health, and the ways schizophrenia is understood and researched in a variety of contexts. She has published some of her findings in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry and is currently finishing a book manuscript based on her dissertation research on the Recovery Movement in the U.S. mental health system. She is currently living in Washington, DC, with her husband, two daughters, and adorable dog, and working under a National Institutes of Health training fellowship at Georgetown University’s Department of Psychiatry.

Michael J. Oldani is an Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He received his doctorate from Princeton University in 2006. He specializes in the study of pharmaceutical culture and its impact on medicine/psychiatry, society, and individuals. His ethnographic research has focused on the sales activities of pharmaceutical salespersons, or “drug reps,” and their impact on doctor prescribing habits as well as the effects of psychiatric medication on personhood and family life.

Branwyn Poleykett has a BA in Modern History from Oxford and a Masters in Community Health from the LSE. She is in the post-fieldwork phase of her doctoral project: Intimacy, Technoscience and the City: Regulating Prostitution in Dakar, 1946-2010. Her research traces the history of the sanitary regulation of prostitution in Dakar across the twentieth century as it moves into the clinical spaces and worlds of practice of experimental virologists and urban development professionals.

Sadeq Rahimi, MSc, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology, and Associate Faculty in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Saskatchewan. Born in Iran, he moved to Canada in 1989 as a political refugee. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural Psychiatry at McGill University and training in Child Psychoanalysis in Montreal, followed by a 4 year Postdoctoral Fellow appointment in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a 2 year Research Fellow appointment at the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and clinical training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy. Dr. Rahimi’s main research focus on culture, subjectivity and mental illnesses has led to two main lines of research, on political subjectivity and on policy development. His current research includes a project on shifting political subjectivity in post-revolutionary Iran, a study of the dynamics and challenges of integration for the Muslim community in Canada, and an ongoing research project on needs assessment and policy recommendations for development of culturally competent mental health services in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Eugene Raikhel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD in anthropology from Princeton University in 2006, and from 2007 to 2010 held a postdoctoral fellowship in the CIHR Strategic Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services Research in the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. His research interests include the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; culture and mental health; addiction and its treatment; as well as the embodied and symbolic grounds of healing and clinical efficacy. He is currently completing a book—Governing Habits: Addiction and the Therapeutic Market in Contemporary Russia—which examines the political-economic, epidemiological and clinical changes that have transformed the knowledge and medical management of alcoholism and addiction in Russia over the past twenty years.

Georgia Richardson-Melody is currently a second year master’s student in the Anthropology department at Wayne State University, with a concentration in Medical Anthropology. In 2007 she received her B.S. in Anthropology from Eastern Michigan University with a minor in human nutrition. Georgia plans to pursue her PhD. in Medical Anthropology and hopes to eventually teach at the college level about culture, health, and illness.

Aaron Seaman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. His dissertation research focuses on the production, cultivation and enactment of caregiving expertise among people with dementia, their family caregivers, and the biomedical community with whom they interact.

Katie Vizenor is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology department at the University at Buffalo. Her dissertation research examines disability community formation and maintenance in virtual worlds. She holds a Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland-College Park. As an Informationist and Researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, she advised public health graduate students and faculty on effective uses of information technology to improve their evidence-based practices. She also researched the use of peer reviewed literature by public health workers and proposed strategies to improve access, education and training as part of an National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded project. From 2002-2004, she was a Research Assistant at the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) in Leipzig, Germany.

Keahnan Washington is pursuing an MS in applied anthropology with a concentration in medical anthropology through the University of North Texas. Keahnan has a background in public health as well as biochemistry and molecular biology, and his primary interest is the alleviation of health disparities and health inequality. He has research interests in critical medical anthropology, political economics, and social epidemiology, as well as nutritional anthropology.