I teach classes on medicine, healing, the body, postcolonial science, and Africa at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. My classes invite students to produce scholarship that goes beyond filling in knowledge gaps—to engage in reading, research and analysis in the hopes of writing the stories we need to envision more just futures. This work requires students to broaden their horizons, learn more about the world around them, and reflect on their own positionality.

Goals that guide my teaching

Classes taught regularly

ANTHR 2468: Medicine, Culture, and Society

This introductory lecture course serves both Anthropology and Biology & Society majors. Drawing a wide variety of students interested in medicine and the biological sciences, it enrolls about 100 students each year. Numerous students have told me that this class, more than any other, has helped them think through why they want to become a doctor as it balances the demands of their science classes with the philosophical, political, historical, and ethical questions raised in medicine.

ANTHR 3465/6465: Anthropology of the Body

This course contributes to the arc of our medicine and healing concentration in anthropology but also regularly draws students from art and architecture, history, engineering, and elsewhere on campus who are interested in approaching the body as it is (re)shaped by culture, history, biology, technology, and ecology. Students investigate ethnographic and historical materials concerning healing and medicine, discipline and labor, governance and religion, aesthetics and desire. Readings examine the ways in which the (re)production of bodies and embodied experiences have been central to power. Together we track how a particular notion of bodily sovereignty has come to animate our politics today.

ANTHR 4682/7682: Medicine and Healing in Africa

Accounts of healing and medicine on the continent describe ongoing struggles over what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to intervene in social and physical threats. This class discusses the expansion of biomedicine in Africa, the continuities and changes embodied in traditional medicine, and the shifting relationship between medicine, science, and law. Our readings trace how colonialism, post-independence nationalism, international development, environmental change, and globalization have shaped the experience of illness, debility, and misfortune today, as well as the possibilities for life, the context of care, and the meaning of death.

ANTHR 4435/7435: Postcolonial Science

Scientific knowledge and practice have enabled the economization of life, labor, and land central to histories of colonial dispossession and postcolonial development. They have also animated diverse struggles to live otherwise. In this class, students examine the ways in which scientists, government officials, activists, and others are developing and mobilizing science in the service of diverse agendas. Our focus is on work that troubles geopolitical divides rooted in colonial imaginaries. Discussions are designed to elucidate the politics of scientific knowledge and practice. Readings draw attention to worlds outside colonial centers of power.

ANTHR 4442/7442: Toxicity

Practices of identifying and managing the “toxic” are central to both the medical and environmental sciences. Toxicity also shapes community activism and public policy. This course takes up the subject of toxicity as a field of expertise, an object of knowledge, and an ethical substance that has come to shape ethical subjects and matters in our contemporary world. Students consider the specific histories of industrialization and of the sciences that shape modern engagements with toxicity, and they explore other ways that the sorts of harms, poisons, and powers glossed as toxicity have been articulated. We examine the modern concept of toxicity as both a mechanism of power—shaping how authorities govern—and a catalyst for opposition. Texts draw from social theory, anthropology, science and technology studies, and history as well as art and activism.

Graduate Only Seminars

ANTHR 6465: Bodies and Bodiliness

In this graduate level course, we take the body and bodiliness as spaces of ethnographic engagement and questioning. Discussion, text and other materials in this class invite students to consider the ways that “the body” as an epistemological and ontological object is transformed through a variety of theoretical, scientific, economic and political projects. Because meditations on the body have rested implicitly or explicitly on theoretical and methodological approaches to experience, students explore histories of bodily senses, appetites, and capacities. Ultimately, our inquiry into contests over and reflections on “the body” and “bodiliness” aim to open up broader anthropological questions about knowledge, authority, agency, sovereignties, and material life.

ANTHR 6403: Ethnographic Research Design and Field Methods

This workshop-style seminar supports students to imagine and design their doctoral research through a focus on the procedures ethnographers use to carry out research and anthropological understandings of what those procedures afford when combined in different ways. The course includes exercises that invite students to root their research in the values that drive their life and work more broadly as a PhD thesis orients the career that follows. Over the course of the semester, we discuss epistemological issues, conceptual questions, practical matters, and ethical and political dilemmas. For second-year sociocultural anthropology graduate students, this course precedes the proposal design class, which requires students to draft their first proposal for funding.

Current and Former Doctoral Students

• Rediet Lewi, Rethinking Mental Health and Migration with Ethiopians in the Diaspora, Department of Anthropology (chair of doctoral committee)
• Hannah Ali, Ethical Life in the Impossible Drug Crisis: Somali Canadians and Harm-reduction Workers Rethinking Suffering, Harm, and Imagined Possibilities, Department of Anthropology (chair of doctoral committee)
• Iris Luo, Barkcloth: Artists, Pluriversal Epistemologies, Place-Based Learning, and Trans-Local Community, Department of Human Centered Design, College of Human Ecology (member of doctoral committee)
• Jeremy Faulk, Department of Human Centered Design, College of Human Ecology (member of doctoral committee)
• Aparjita Majumdar, 2024, Planting Recalcitrance: Nature, Knowledge and Heritage in a South Asian Borderland, Department of History (member doctoral committee). Currently, Assistant Professor at Brown University.
• Lisa Lehner, 2023, The Liminal Cure: Living with Hepatitis C, Its Treatment, and the Welfare State in Austria, Department of Science and Technology Studies (member of doctoral committee). Currently, PostDoc and Lead Researcher at the University of Vienna and the Health Matters Research Group, Department of Social & Cultural Anthropology.
• Rebekah Ciribassi, 2022, Temporalities of Sickled Cells: Bodily Inheritance, Genetic Medicine, and Intergenerational Time in Tanzania, Department of Anthropology (chair of doctoral committee). Currently, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo.
• Charis Boke, 2018, Ecologies of Friendship: Learning North American Practices of Care with Western Herbalists, Department of Anthropology (chair of doctoral committee). Currently, Research Associate and Lecturer at Dartmouth.
• Hayden Kantor, 2016, Daily Bread: Agrarian Futures and the Caring Family in Bihar, India, Department of Anthropology. Funded by AIIS and Wenner-Gren. Winner of the Guilford Essay Prize from the Cornell English department (chair of doctoral committee). Currently, Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University.
• Jason Blaesing, “Ontology of Number in Peruvian Healing,” Department of Anthropology (chair of MA committee)
• Amy Levine, 2011, The Hope and Crisis of Pragmatic Transition: Politics, Law, Anthropology, and South Korea, Department of Anthropology (member of doctoral committee). Currently, Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Victoria, Canada.
• Ashley Elizabeth Smith, 2017, Re-Membering Norridgewock: Stories and Politics of a Place Multiple, PhD Anthropology, Cornell University (member of doctoral committee). Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and Environmental Justice at Hampshire College.
• Danya Glabau, 2016, Morality in Action: Risking Death and Caring for Life in American Food Allergy Worlds, Department of Science and Technology Studies (member of doctoral committee). Assistant Professor, NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
• Saiba Varma, 2013, Many Lives of Suffering: Human Rights and Psychiatry in Practice in Kashmir, Department of Anthropology (member of doctoral committee). Currently, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Anthropology, UC San Diego.
• Thomas Archibald, 2013, Participation and Power in African Youth Development: Non-Formal Literacy Education in Senegal, Department of Education (member of doctoral committee). Executive Director for the Center for International Research, Education, and Development at Virginia Tech.
• Jennifer L. Hale Gallardo, 2013, Conjuring Equity: Nahua Healers and the Cultural Politics of Institutionalizing Traditional Medicine in Mexico, PhD, University of Florida (co-chair of doctoral committee with Faye Harrison). Currently at the Center of Innovation on Disability and Rehab Research, US Department of Veterans’ Affairs.
• Scott Sorrell, Queer Experiences of the Expansion of Public and Private Urban Infrastructure in Bangalore, India, Department of Anthropology (member of doctoral committee). Currently, Knight Institute Outreach Coordinator and Visiting Lecturer in the Writing Workshop, John S. Knight Institute, Cornell University.
• Erin Mahaffey, 2012, Public-Private Partnerships and Social Marketing around AIDS Prevention in Tanzania, PhD, UC Berkeley (member of doctoral committee)
• Julia Zenker, 2011, The Modernization of Traditional Healing in South Africa: Healers, Biomedicine and the State, Institute of Social Anthropology, Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany (member of doctoral committee). Currently, Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

Master’s Students at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical College in Tanzania

• Patience Mwose Chumah, 2024, Dermatology, Tumaini University Makumira/Kilimanjaro Christian Medical University College, Tanzania. “Photoprotection and Clinical Outcomes of Persons with Albinism in Northern Tanzania: Outreach Program vs non-Program Participants” (External supervisor for Master of Medicine Dermato-venereology)
• Bwanali Jereni, 2014, Dermatology, Kilimanjaro Christian Medical University College/Tumaini University, Tanzania. “Prevalence of Atopic Eczema and Treatment Seeking Preferences in Kilimanjaro Tanzania” (co-supervisor for MA committee)

McNair Mentor at Cornell

• Ami Tamakloe, Women Political Participation, Festivals and Storytelling in Anlo-Ewe ethnic group in Western Africa, McNair Scholar mentor.

Recent Mentorship of Students at Weill Cornell

• Toni Liwa, 2012–2015, Committee member for his Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology at Weill Cornell Medical. Hypertension and Traditional Medicine in Tanzania. Currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Institute of Allied Health Sciences, Catholic University of Health and Allied Sciences, Mwanza, Tanzania.
• Claire Isabelle Catherine Verret, 2018, supervisor for Summer Elective Research at KCMC, evaluating Albinism Outreach Program. MD degree candidate class of 2019, Weill Cornell Medicine. Currently, Orthopedic Surgeon, Katz Women’s Hospital at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.
• Duncan Hau, Social Science Mentor for CTSC Master’s Degree in Clinical & Translational Investigation, Weill Cornell Medical. Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, Weill Cornell Medicine, Director Pediatric Hospitalist Program, New York Presbyterian/Lower Manhattan Hospital.

Recent Undergraduate Honors Theses

• Sayuri Inoue Pfeiffer, forthcoming 2026, microbiome as a site to rethink human and ecological health
• Raudiyat Anuoluwa Onimode, forthcoming 2026, Systematic Review of Climate Change and Medical Education
• Lucy Friedman, 2025, Psychodynamics vs. Psychopharmacology: Rethinking the Mental Health Crisis in University Settings, Department of Psychology, Cornell University (reader on thesis committee)
• Bianca Ysabel Garcia, 2023, “The Molo Story” and Other Narratives about Healing with Food, Honors Thesis, Bachelor of Arts, Anthropology (advisor and chair of thesis committee). Currently, American Association for the Advancement of Science 2025 Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellow @WUNC.
• Mehria Nessar, 2023, Melodies of the Mundane: Migration, Rhythms, and Disruptions of Daily Living, Honors Thesis, Bachelor of Arts, Anthropology (advisor and chair of thesis committee)
• Grace Olivia Staes, 2023, A Sister’s Hope: Finding Peace at the Intersection of Murals and Police Brutality, Honors Thesis, Anthropology, Cornell University (chair of thesis committee)
• Lindsay “Lou” Vinarcsik, 2018, Caring in the Landscape of Biomedicine: Rethinking Citizen Science in Alzheimer’s Disease, Honors Thesis, Biology and Society, Cornell University (member of thesis committee)
• Hillary Drexler, 2011, Good Things Come to Those Who Wait: The Allocation of Expanded Criteria Donor Kidneys in the United States, Honors Thesis, Bachelor of Arts, Biology and Society (member of thesis committee)
• Elena Romana Siani, 2011, Rhythm and Relief: Music for Health, Department of Music (member of thesis committee)
• Yokiro Nakamura, 2011, The Sociological Consequences of Pharmaceutical Marketing on Doctor-Patient Relationships, Biology and Society (member of thesis committee)