Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology

Peter J. Brown is a medical anthropologist holding a joint faculty appointment in anthropology and global health at Emory University. He has served as editor-in-chief of the journal Medical Anthropology and has won several national teaching and mentoring awards. His research interests are in culture and disease ecology, with particular focus on malaria and obesity. He is co-editor of The Anthropology of Infectious Disease: International Health Perspectives (Routledge, 1998), Applying Anthropology (McGraw-Hill, 2011), Applying Cultural Anthropology (McGraw-Hill, 2012), and the two previous editions of Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology. He is senior academic advisor to the Emory Global Health Institute and served on a malaria-related Scientific Advisory Committee for the World Health Organization. Svea Closser is associate professor of anthropology and director of the Global Health Program at Middlebury College. Her professional interests are focused on the interaction between global health policy and local health systems. Closser’s recent research projects include a seven-country study of polio eradication and health systems, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and a study of ground-level health staff in Ethiopia, funded by the National Science Foundation. She is the author of Chasing Polio in Pakistan: Why the World’s Largest Public Health Initiative May Fail (Vanderbilt University Press, 2010), which won Vanderbilt University Press’s Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for the best project in the area of medicine.