Emily Mendenhall

Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist and Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She has published widely at the boundaries of anthropology, psychology, medicine, and public health. Dr. Mendenhall is the author of Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women (2012), Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV (2019), and Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (2022). In 2017, she led a Series in The Lancet on syndemics—a theory of how and why social and health conditions travel together. Other writing addresses mental health, cultural idioms of distress, health politics and systems, migration and health, and flourishing. In 2017 Dr. Mendenhall was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology. Dr. Mendenhall is Editor-in-Chief of Social Science and Medicine-Mental Health and leads the office of Medical Anthropology and Critical Social Science. She has served as Honorary Faculty at the University of the Witwatersrand for the past decade. At Georgetown, she leads the global health concentration in the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program in the School of Foreign Service.