Academic Resources: graduate programs
University of Washington
Faculty:
Medical anthropology is a very broad, interdisciplinary, and inter-subdisciplinary field, encompassing scholars who study a wide variety of specific topics relating to health, illness, and healing from sociocultural, biocultural, clinically applied, and other related perspectives. Although medical anthropology is not a separate program at the University of Washington, a rich array of resources are available to support those who wish to concentrate in medical anthropology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
The Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington includes four medical anthropologists among its regular full-time faculty. On the sociocultural faculty are three anthropologists with primary interests in critical, interpretive, and applied anthropology of medicine. Lorna A. Rhodes has researched and written about biomedicine, psychiatry, and institutions in the United States, as well as religion and healing in Sri Lanka. Janelle S. Taylor has researched and written on technology, medicine, and media in the practices and politics of reproduction in the United States, as well as on conceptualizations of "culture" within "cultural competence" efforts in medical education. Rachel R. Chapman has active research programs in both the U.S. and Mozambique, and has interests in urban health, racial and ethnic disparities in health, reproductive health, applied international health, and political economy. On the faculty of the biocultural anthropology program is Donna Leonetti, whose research interests include biological and behavioral interactions which affect health, fertility, and child growth as affected by household ecology, social epidemiology of diabetes, and cardiovascular disease and aging among Asian-American ethnic groups.
Several other members of the department's faculty also have interests in medical anthropology broadly construed. In the faculty of the sociocultural anthropology program, Jim Green has research interests in cross-cultural mental health and the comparative study of death in the West Indies and Pakistan. Eugene Hunn has studied traditional plant-based medicines in the context of his research on ethnobotany in Mesoamerica and the Northwest American Plateau. In the biocultural anthropology program, Bettina Shell-Duncan studies epidemiology, disease ecology, demography, and maternal and child morbidity and mortality in East Africa.
Three more medical anthropologists affiliated with the Department of Anthropology are located in the School of Nursing. Noel J. Chrisman has research interests in urban anthropology, applied anthropology, ethnicity, and social networks in the United States. Marjorie Muecke's research has focused, for more than 25 years, on gender, health, and reproductive health (including sexuality and HIV/AIDS) in the urban context of policy-driven "development" and rapid change in Thailand. Barbara Burns McGrath has taught medical anthropology and studies healing in Polynesia, HIV/AIDS in U.S. Pacific Island communities, and new genetic science and technologies.
Yet another medical anthropologist with connections to the Department of Anthropology is based in the International Health Program, of the School of Public Health. James Pfeiffer has research interests in East Africa and in the topics of international health, applied anthropology, political economy, and religion.
For more information visit: http://depts.washington.edu/anthweb/programs/specialty.php#medical
updated May 1, 2005