My name is Emily Mendenhall, and I’m an award-winning author, anthropologist, editor, and professor. My work often addresses challenges people face at the intersections of culture, health, and politics, and focuses on how people navigate the troubled waters of chronic illness and find strength in the people around them.
I grew up in Okoboji, Iowa, a tourist town in the northwest corner of the state. Most people in my family are doctors or farmers. My sister moved back to Iowa and has a small organic farm and does policy work around agriculture. I’m a medical anthropologist and professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. I live in the DC area with my husband (Adam Koon), two daughters, and two pups.
I left Iowa for Davidson College in North Carolina, where I spent time with incredible professors and friends to small towns and cities in Nicaragua, Zambia, and Chile. It was during these extended periods of travel and learning where I began to understand the powerful practice of ethnography, and observing the world around me in a deep and concentrated way. This is what anthropologists call “deep hanging out.” Later, I studied global public health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health while working on an HIV project in Zambia as well as projects in human rights and international development. Then I spent time working and traveling in Guatemala before I returned to Chicago and worked in the old Cook County Hospital. I loved working with such an immensely dedicated group of clinicians, administrators, and researchers, and spent a great deal of time at the hospital while I completed my PhD in anthropology at Northwestern University—just a few miles away.
I left Chicago for Delhi, where I completed a fellowship with a research team at the Public Health Foundation of India, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center. Then, I moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, where I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of the Witwatersrand. Then, I spent time at the London School of Hygiene’s Centre for Global Mental Health, while my husband was completing his PhD there. Soon after, we relocated to Washington, DC, to work at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. I’ve worked in the Science, Technology, and International Affairs Program since 2013.
Over these years, the complexities of syndemics—of the synergies of epidemics—became clear in my work with people living with type 2 diabetes. Although most people wanted me to write about diabetes, I never met anyone with one problem. Instead, people described multiple challenges in their lives, including co-occurring medical conditions as well as social and emotional challenges. My time at the hospital in Chicago was incredibly influential in my writing on syndemic theory. This work was central to my early publications in anthropology, medicine, psychology, and public health, and was the focus of my books, Syndemic Suffering (2012) and Rethinking Diabetes (2019), and Special Issues on syndemics that I led in The Lancet and in Social Science and Medicine. I was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2017 for this work.
Before the pandemic, I was working in Soweto, South Africa, on a four year study of syndemics. 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 good summary can be found on the Nature Social and Behavioral Sciences Blog.
In the middle of the pandemic, I moved with my family back to Iowa to quarantine with my parents, sister, and her family. We arrived in the middle of an outbreak, and I was drawn into a study of why so few people were masking and taking other precautions in my hometown. This was in stark contrast to Washington, DC, and my community of academics and friends who were deeply engaged in global health security and prevention efforts. This research culminated in my award-winning trade book Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji. I’ve also written about these topics in Vox, Scary Mommy, Scientific American, and academic journals, including Social Science and Medicine and Global Public Health. This work was 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.
In 2023, I was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In 2022, I had a student who became really sick with Long Covid and I helped him get through school and his thesis, which he turned into a personal story of his illness experience. Then, we turned toward research with others - patients, clinicians, academics, policymakers--and we did a lot of thinking together. Then I got sick and it pummeled me for several months (mostly with anxiety and fatigue); along the way I applied for research to dig into how Long Covid (and its symptoms) are one more expression of an illness that people have been living with for years. This culminated in my new book, Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid. This book is a moving cultural history of disability and a powerful call-to-action to change how our medical system and society supports those with complex chronic conditions. I have also written about Long COVID in Social Science and Medicine, Scientific American, and Current History.