Joao Biehl

Joao Biehl

Fellow: Awarded 2008
Field of Study: Iberian and Latin American History

Competition: US & Canada

Princeton University

João Biehl, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, is the author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (2005) and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (2007). He also co-edited the book Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (2007). Vita garnered six book awards, including the 2007 Margaret Mead Award, and  Will to Live has been awarded the 2008 Diana Forsythe Prize.

Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2001, Mr. Biehl was a National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1999) and a Ph.D. in religion from the Graduate Theological Union (1996). He earned undergraduate degrees in theology and journalism and a master’s degree in philosophy from academic institutions in Brazil.  Mr. Biehl was a member of the School of Social Science and of the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.

During his tenure as a Guggenheim Fellow, Mr. Biehl will be working on a new book titled The Valley of Lamentation: Spirituality and War in a German Community in 19th Century Brazil.  He is also leading a research project on the aftermath of large-scale drug rollouts in resource-poor settings (with a focus on drug resistance and access to second-line treatments and on judicial claims to high-cost medicines).

João Biehl received Princeton’s Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005.

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