Emily Mendenhall: podcast appearances and interviews

Emily Mendenhall, born in 1982, is a medical anthropologist and a professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research explores a range of topics including syndemics, mental health, cultural idioms of distress, health politics and systems, migration and health, flourishing, and complex chronic conditions. Mendenhall has made significant contributions to her field, notably receiving the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology in 2017 from the Society for Medical Anthropology for her work on syndemics. In 2023, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in honor of her anthropological work on COVID-19. She is the author of several books, including Syndemic Suffering which examines social distress, depression, and diabetes among Mexican immigrant women; Global Mental Health, co-authored with Brandon Kohrt; Rethinking Diabetes, which discusses its connections with trauma, poverty, and HIV; Unmasked, a study of COVID-19, community, and the case of Okoboji; and Invisible Illness, a history of conditions from hysteria to Long Covid. In 2017, she led a series in The Lancet on syndemics, focusing on how social and health conditions tend to co-occur and impact communities.