In the fall of 2019, the Department of Anthropology, in collaboration with the Department of History conducted a search for the Asseff Chair in the Anthropology and History of Medicine. The position, funded by an endowment from alumnus, Dr. Carl Asseff, and the Infectious Disease Institute, was for a medical anthropologist with a research focus in the social dimensions of infectious disease. On-campus interviews were conducted in the early spring 2020 and, in April, the Anthropology Department announced that Dr. Erin Moore accepted the job offer. She will join the Anthropology Department in the fall 2020. We look forward to welcoming her to campus.

Dr. Moore, a medical anthropologist, received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2016. Her research interests are in critical global health, gender and sexuality, and the institutional ethnography of NGOs. Geographically focused in sub-Saharan Africa, Dr. Moore is currently investigating the gendered economic history of Uganda’s devastating HIV epidemic and has published on a range of inter-related subjects including development interventions targeting adolescent girls, love and deception in the sexual economy, and translating global feminisms. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Association for University Women, among others. She joins The Ohio State University from the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

In the fall 2020, Dr. Moore will teach the new medical anthropology course, “Anthropology, Public Health, and Human Rights” (ANTHROP 5700). Using critical anthropological perspectives, the course will explore the politics, economics, and cultural logics of the global health industry. To cover this topic, the course will engage a range of theoretical perspectives and diversity of materials including representations of illness, medicine, and care in fiction, film, memoir, and new media; ethnographic case studies; disability and health rights activism; and theories from anthropology and science and technology studies. Dr. Moore will also teach History 2703: History of Public Health, Medicine and Disease.

Welcome, Dr. Moore! We are excited to have you.