Contact
Email:
amorant@mit.edu
Amy Moran-Thomas is a cultural anthropologist, interested in the material and ecological entanglements that shape health and medicine in practice. She became an assistant professor of anthropology at MIT in 2015, after completing postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton and Brown University. Focusing on metabolic and parasitic disorders, her research bridges the anthropology of health and environment (chronic disease, ecological and agricultural change, metabolism and nutrition) with ethnographic studies of science and technology (medical devices, epigenetic debates, technology and kinship). Moran-Thomas has conducted fieldwork and archival research in Belize, Guatemala, Ghana, and the US, supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Mellon-American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows, the Rachel Carson Center, the West African Research Association, and the American Philosophical Society. Her forthcoming book project, blending ethnographic stories and science writing with mixed-media anthropological analyses, offers a humanistic account of the global diabetes epidemic.
RCC Research Project: Metabola: Planetary Health and the Global Diabetes Epidemic in Belize
Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Planetary Health and the Global Diabetes Epidemic
Selected Publications:
- “Mine.” In Hotspots, Cultural Anthropology, 18 January 2017.
- “I Didn't Bring My Camera.” In Book Forum—Hervé Guiber’s “Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary,” edited by Eugene Raikhel. Somatosphere, 2016.
- “Breakthroughs for Whom?: Global Diabetes Care and Equitable Design.” New England Journal of Medicine 375, no. 24 (2016): 2317–19.
- “A Salvage Ethnography of the Guinea Worm.” In When People Came First: Critical Studies in Global Health, edited by Joao Biehl and Adriana Petryna. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
- with Joao Biehl. “Symptom: Subjectivities, Social Ills, Technologies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 38 (2009): 267–88.