University of South Florida Profile

Ph.D., M.A., Anthropology, University of Virginia

A.B. Religious Studies, Kenyon College

Specialties

Socio-cultural anthropology; medical anthropology; South Asian studies; sex, gender, sexuality studies; anthropology of reproduction; cultural demography; global health; medical humanities

Sociocultural Anthropology

Regional focus: South Asia, India.

Topical interests: Reproduction, kinship studies, medical anthropology, population studies.

Current Activities and Location: Associate Professor of Instruction, Judy Genshaft Honors College, University of South Florida. Affiliated faculty, Departments of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies, Tampa, Florida.

Long-term ethnographic research in north India grounds my work, which emphasizes women's situated perspectives on reproduction, kinship, and health. I regularly draw on global and applied perspectives on health, healing, and culture, as well as literary and popular culture representations in English, Hindi, and Urdu, in the analysis of contemporary circumstances.

Selected Courses:

Fertility and the Future

Global Health with People First

Healing and Everyday Crises in South Asia

Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice

Selected Publications

Book

2022 Infertility in a Crowded Country: Hiding Reproduction in India. Indiana University Press.

Other

2020 "Numbering Others: Religious Demography, Identity, and the Everyday of Fertility Management in Contemporary India." Social Science & Medicine 254, part-Special Issue, Reproductive Health Ethnography, guest edited by Jan Brunson and Siri Suh, June https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112534  

2018 "Surrogacy and Gendered Contexts of Management in India." In International Handbook of Gender and Demographic Processes, Nancy E. Riley and Jan Brunson, eds., ch. 8, p. 105-116 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1290-1_8

2017 "Fertility Control: Reproductive Desires, Kin Work, and Women's Status in Contemporary India," Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31(1): 23-39 https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12312

2017 Foreword to How May I Help You?: An Immigrant's Journey from MBA to Minimum Wage by Deepak Singh, University of California Press.

2016 "Patriarchy, Privilege, and Power: Intimacies and Bargains in Ethnographic Production," Anthropology & Humanism 41(1): 8-27. https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12104

2015 "Infertility in Women's Lives: Ethnographic Perspectives on Reproductive Labor in India." In Public Health and Development in India, ed. S.B. Nimse and M.K. Agarwal. New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, ch. 17

2014 "The World's Back Womb?: Commercial Surrogacy and Infertility Inequalities in India." American Anthropologist 116(4):824-828. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12146

2006 "Give Me Your Sorrows." Translation of Urdu short story, "Apne Dukh Mujhe De Do" by Rajinder Singh Bedi. Annual of Urdu Studies 21:250-272.