Emily Mendenhall is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Previously, she was a visiting Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, National Institutes of Health Fogarty Scholar at the Public Health Foundation of India, and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she still holds an Honorary Appointment. She lives in the DC area with her husband (who is also a professor of global health), dog, and two little girls who have honed their karate kicks and cartwheels in quarantine.
Dr. Mendenhall has published widely in anthropology, medicine, and public health. In 2017, she led a Series of articles on Syndemics in The Lancet to challenge how we understand concurrent epidemics to cluster, interact, and result from politics, climate, and society. This work was influenced by more than a decade of research about how people perceive, experience, and embody trauma and diabetes through personal stories. This culminated in the book Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV (2019, Cornell). She is also the author of Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women (2012) and co-editor of Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives (2015). In 2017, Dr. Mendenhall was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology.
She currently is writing a book about how people perceive and experience coronavirus in rural Iowa – a place where no mandates were in place and cultural conflicts were at the heart of people’s decisions to mask, socially distance, or continue with life as usual. She also has ongoing research on coronavirus in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she has worked for nearly a decade. She is the Principle Investigator of the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center study “Soweto Syndemics” at Wits.
Lancet Series on Syndemics: READ the Series, LISTEN to the podcast
Dr. Mendenhall often mentors PhD students at Wits so please reach out if you are interested in doing your PhD with Dr. Mendenhall at Wits, or collaborating in some other way. Previously, the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center, South African Medical Research Council, and Northwestern and Georgetown Universities have supported her scholarship.
She also spent a decade creating global health curriculum for youth: www.GHN4C.or