Susan Greenhalgh is an author, anthropologist, and specialist on contemporary China. Her interests lie in the social and political study of science, technology, and medicine, with a special focus on women’s health.

She is the John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of Chinese Society in the Anthropology Department at Harvard University. Before joining Harvard in 2011, she was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine and, before that, Senior Research Associate of the Population Council in New York City. She earned her doctorate and master’s degrees in anthropology from Columbia University and undergraduate degree in psychology from Wellesley College.

Since 1990, Greenhalgh has pursued five research-and-writing projects. These focus on the human costs of America’s “war on fat,” how Big Soda has intervened in China’s obesity epidemic, the political entanglements of science and technology in China, the origins and effects of China’s one-child policy, and the clinical “manufacture” of chronic pain.

What these diverse projects have in common is a fundamentally political concern about the operations and effects of institutionalized power -- the power of state bureaucracies, for example, or of large corporations, or even of scientific communities. In her work, she seeks to discover how the power embedded in such institutions works, what effects it produces, especially in the lives of ordinary people, and how it masks itself, with the goal of holding power accountable for what it does in the world. This is public anthropology -- anthropology that draws on in-depth ethnography and contemporary theory to address critical issues of the day.

Greenhalgh has authored five books and edited or co-edited four collections. Her essays have appeared in journals and edited books in anthropology, China studies, science and technology studies, women and gender studies, population studies, and medicine and public health.

As a writer always in search of effective means of communicating new ideas, she has experimented with such genres as auto-ethnography, narrative nonfiction, the feminist detective story, and multi-author/multi-discipline textual forms.

Greenhalgh’s work has been recognized by several life-time career achievement awards. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Harvard’s Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship, the Clifford C. Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement of the Population Association of America, and the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for Excellence in Writing and Editing in the Population Sciences.

Her book on the origins of China’s one-child policy, "Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China," took the top book prizes in China studies and science studies and earned honorable mention in two major book competitions in anthropology.

Her research has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the American Association of University Women, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and multiple research centers at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California, Irvine.

Authors, Women, Anthropology, Culture, Misc. Society & Culture Tags China, Professors,