Photo of Julie Livingston

Julie Livingston

Professor

Education

  • 2001 Ph.D. in African History, Emory University
  • 1993 M.P.H. in Health Services, Boston University
  • 1992 Certificate of Public Health in Developing Countries, Boston University
  • 1992 M.A. in African History, Boston University
  • 1989 B.A. in Comparative Religion, Tufts University

Areas of Research/Interest

The Body, Southern Africa, Interspecies, Gender, Ethnography, Development

External Affiliation

History Department

Awards

  • 2013-2018 MacArthur Fellowship, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
  • 2014 William H. Welch Medal, The American Association for the History of Medicine
  • 2013 The Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, The Society for Humanistic Anthropology, American Anthropological Association
  • 2012 The Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems, Royal Anthropological Institute (UK)
  • 2010-2011 Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Institute for Advanced Study, invited fellow and co-convener of a research group on “Professional Dilemmas of Clinical Practice in Africa,
  • 2010 Cultural Horizons Prize, Society for Cultural Anthropology (Honorable Mention)
  • 2006 Board of Trustees Fellowship Award for Scholarly Excellence, Rutgers University
  • 2003-2006 Princeton University Society of Fellows, Cotsen Fellowship (declined)
  • 1998-1999 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship

Bio

Julie Livingston is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, where she is also affiliated with the anthropology department. She is interested in the human body as a moral condition and mode of consciousness, in care as a social practice, and in taxonomy and relationships that upend or complicate it. Her work is at the intersection of history, anthropology, and public health. She is the author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press, 2012), Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press 2005), and numerous articles and essays on topics including aging, disability, disgust, suicide, and medical photography. Livingston is currently working on two new projects. The first is a book-length essay on the problem of growth and consumption as seen from southern Africa. The second is an ethnographic project on co-morbidity and aging in New York.

Publications

  • Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
    Duke University Press, 2012
  • Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (African Systems of Thought Series)
    Indiana University Press, 2005

Edited Books and Journals

Collateral and Afterworlds: Sociality Besides Redemption, Special issue of Social Text (co-edited with Zoe Wool), Issue 130, spring 2017  

Interspecies.  Special issue of Social Text (co-edited with Jasbir Puar) Issue 106, spring 2011

Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions. Eds. Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, Steven Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and the Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship.  Eds. Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston and Peter Guarnaccia. (Studies in Social Medicine Series) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006