Dr. Prof. Amy Moran-Thomas

Amy Moran-Thomas is the Andrew W. Mellon associate professor of anthropology at MIT. As a cultural and medical anthropologist, she focuses on how health technologies and ecologies are designed and materially embodied—often inequitably—by people in their ordinary lives. Her first book, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic, offers an anthropological account of diabetes care technologies and the lives they shape from a global perspective. Together with colleagues in Belize and Barbados, Moran-Thomas is currently co-leading a climate and health humanities project funded by an ACLS Digital Seed Grant, titled “Sugar Atlas: Counter-Mapping Diabetes from the Caribbean.” She is also working on a second book project regarding the embodied histories of energy and rural health in upper Appalachia. Professor Moran-Thomas is interested in how social perspectives on design can contribute to producing more equitable technologies and fairer systems of science and medicine. More broadly, her research explores the material culture of chronic conditions, the embodied aspects of planetary health, dilemmas of intergenerational responsibility, and public anthropology writing.

RCC Project: Questions About Medical Geology and the Rise of Young Cancers, as Seen from Rachel Carson's Childhood Home in Western Pennsylvania

Selected Publications:

• “Battle in the Clouds.” American Anthropologist 127, no. 3 (2025): 594–610. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28075.
• “Mine: Kinship in Deep Time Across the Pennsylvania Salient.” In Scholars and Their Kin: Historical Explorations, Literary Experiments, edited by Stéphane Gerson. University of Chicago Press, 2025. 
• with Susan Reverby. “On the Appearance and Disappearance of Difficult Histories: What Does it Take to Sustain Public Memory?” American Journal of Public Health 114, no. 6 (2024): 564–68. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.307643.
• “Notes from a Fever Dream.” Anthropology Now 13, no. 1 (2021): 11–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2021.1903487.
• “Oximeters Used to Be Designed for Equity. What Happened?” Wired, 4 June 2021, https://www.wired.com/story/pulse-oximeters-equity/.
• Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic. University of California Press, 2019. Book PDF open access here.