Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist and 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 received a PhD in anthropology from Northwestern University and MPH in global public health from Emory University. She lives in the DC area with her husband (Adam Koon), daughters, and dog, who often attends her classes. She is on sabbatical as a Guggenheim Fellow for the 2023-4 academic year writing on Long Covid.
Mendenhall has published widely in anthropology, medicine, psychology, and public health. Her books include Syndemic Suffering (2012), Global Mental Health ( 2015), Rethinking Diabetes (2019), and Unmasked (2022). She has edited several Special Issues on syndemics (The Lancet), migration and health (BMJ Global Health), and syndemic theory and methods (Social Science and Medicine). Professor Mendenhall was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2017.
Mendenhall’s award-winning trade book Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji investigates how people responded to COVID-19 in her hometown in northwest Iowa. Unmasked explores political priorities, cultural squabbles, and business interests that undermined public health efforts when no mandates were in place. Mendenhall has written about this research in Vox, Scary Mommy, Scientific American, and academic journals, including Social Science and Medicine and Global Public Health. Her work has been highlighted in COVID Quickly at Scientific American, Talk of Iowa, Psychology Today, Campaign for the American Reader, Schools of Foreign Service News, The E’Ville Good, and Iowa Science Interface. Unmasked was awarded the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for best book of the year in art and medicine from Vanderbilt University Press in 2022.
Professor Mendenhall recently completed a four year study of syndemics in Soweto, South Africa. The study was derailed in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, influencing writing in Scientific American, Think Global Health, and The Conversation. Publications from this project span many topics, including syndemics, mental health during the pandemic, psychometrics, healing through God, spirituality and the Church, and flourishing. Some of these articles have been published in Nature Human Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, SSM-MH, Global Public Health, and Psychological Medicine. A summary of this work can be found on the Nature Social and Behavioral Sciences Blog.
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 the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program in the School of Foreign Service