Ph.D. (Social Studies of Medicine & Anthropology) 2004, McGill University, M.A. (Social Anthropology), York University, HBSc. (Human Biology and Anthropology), University of Toronto

Sean Brotherton
Professor
Anthropology of medicine, science, technology, and the body; social theory; subjectivity and health; humanitarianism; post-coloniality/decoloniality; governmentality; theories of post-/socialism; psychoanalysis/psychological anthropology; Latin America and the Caribbean.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. P. Sean Brotherton is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. He is a cultural anthropologist who studies and theorizes health, medicine, the state, subjectivity, and psychoanalysis. Brotherton’s research intervenes in debates of medical anthropology, the anthropology of the body, and Latin American and Caribbean studies. Across his work, he asks: What constitutes health or well-being, or the notion of a healthy subject, to whom does it matter, and why?
Over the past two decades, his overarching research questions have sought to weave historical, epistemological, and ethnographic modes of analysis into a theoretical approach that he calls a ‘genealogy of individual bodily practices.’ Within this framework, he examines the sometimes contradictory and overlapping relationships among quotidian individual practices, economic reform, and state power. This approach helps unravel the multiple historical layers that contribute to bodily formations, both culturally and materially, and allows scholars to critically examine the lived experience of bodies. His first book, Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba (Duke University Press, 2012), employs this analytical lens to analyze how different sociopolitical fields create and transform political subjectivities. It urges scholars to delve into the nebulous field of embodiment, asking pointed questions about how subjects respond, enact, and rearticulate ideological assumptions in their everyday practices.
Currently under contract at Duke University Press, his second monograph, Global Health, Otherwise: Cuba and the Politics of Humanitarianism, examines the absent-presence of Cuba’s international solidarity humanitarian efforts as a non-event in the contemporary global health landscape. Under the umbrella of solidarity missions, Cuba has dispatched tens of thousands of medical brigades to geographically diverse locales since the early 1960s. In scope, depth, and breadth, the magnitude of this brand of humanitarianism far outpaces the most iconic faces of the contemporary global health industry, such as Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, or UNICEF. Despite these efforts, Cuba’s quest for global health equity occupies the margin, or the subaltern, in the global health landscape, even for a field that uncritically celebrates quantitative metrics. Cuba is the so-called alternative or exception in mainstream debates about global health equity. What, then, are the structuring logics shaping global health’s dominant script—that is, the problematics, concepts, methods, and practices—that render different imaginaries of care and aid as illegible and thus unthinkable?
Another project underway, Armed Against Unhappiness: Psychoanalytic Grammars in Buenos Aires, explores how psychoanalysis has produced an ensemble of institutions, expertise, procedures, and practices. Through this, psychic life has become legible and an actionable site of intervention, dislocation, and struggle. Brotherton examines how diverse psychoanalytic communities in Buenos Aires have produced distinctive grammar(s) that influence how individuals articulate ideas about health and well-being. Through detailed case studies, he explains how these grammars, deictic expressions of/for the unconscious, are deployed, reworked, and embodied in everyday interactions. This work highlights how social and political experiences enmesh psychic life.
GRANTS/FELLOWSHIPS/HONORS
- 2013-14 The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund (Organizer for the conference, titled Counter Vitalities: Life at the Edges of Global Health, Spring 2014),
- 2013-14 Yale’s Council for Latin American and Iberian Studies Conference Grant (Counter Vitalities: Life at the Edges of Global Health, Spring 2014)
- 2013-14 Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies (FLAGS), Yale University (Sexuality and the Body in Psychoanalytic Culture in Buenos Aires, Argentina)
- 2013 Griswold Faculty Research Grant, Yale University (Talk Therapy: Trauma, Memory, and the Body in Psychoanalytic Culture in Buenos Aires, Argentina)
- 2013 MacMillan Faculty Research Grant, Yale University (Talk Therapy: Trauma, Memory, and the Body in Psychoanalytic Culture in Buenos Aires, Argentina)
- 2013 Yale’s Council for Latin American and Iberian Studies Curriculum Development Grant
- 2010-2011 Junior Faculty Fellowship, research leave for the academic year
- 2010-2011 MacMillan Faculty Research Grant, Yale University
- 2011 Yale’s Council for Latin American and Iberian Studies Curriculum Development Grant
- 2010-2011 Yale’s Hilles Publication Fund
- 2004-2006 Postdoctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada
- 2000 Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc., Individual Research Grant (“Revolutionary” Health and Medicine: Policy, Power, and Practices in Havana, Cuba)
- 2000 Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Doctoral Award (“Revolutionary” Health and Medicine: Policy, Power, and Practices in Havana, Cuba)
- 2000 McGill University, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Internal Research Grant (“Revolutionary” Health and Medicine: Policy, Power and Practices in Havana, Cuba
- 1999 McGill University Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research Fellowship
- 1998 McGill University Faculty of Graduate Studies Bursary Award/Fellowship,
- 1997 Royal Anthropological Institute (UK), E. Horniman Award (The Constructed “Other”: Colonialism, Medicine and Representation — AIDS and the “Black Body” in Jamaica),
- 1997 Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Academic Award (“Contagious Bodies:” (Re)Defining Risk, Stigma and the Moral Order in HIV/AIDS Education and Prevention Programs in Jamaica)
- 1997 York University Fieldwork Cost Award (The Constructed “Other”: Colonialism, Medicine and Representation — AIDS and the “Black Body” in Jamaica)
Publications
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Medical Anthropology Quarterly.34(1): 99-118.
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Cultural Anthropology, HotSpot
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2013.Special Issue (Guest Editor with Vinh-Kim Nguyen): Beyond the Body Proper: Global Politics/Local Biology.Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness.32(4).
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2013.Revisiting Local Biology in the Era of Global Health. Brotherton, P. Sean, and Vinh-Kim Nguyen.Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 32(4): 287-290.
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Health Travels: Cuban Health(Care) on the Island and Around the World. University of California Press, pp. 127-151.
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Troubling Natural Categories: Essays in Honor of Margaret Lock. McGill-Queen's University Press, pp. 16-32.
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2011."Health and Health Care in Cuba: History after the Revolution: Key Phases and Overviews of Health Development," In Alan West-Duran, ed.,Cuba: People, Culture, and History. NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 478-485.
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Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 10(2): 339-369,.
Contact Information
Sean Brotherton
Professor sbrotherton@nyu.edu 25 Waverly PlRoom 509
New York, NY 10003
Phone: (212) 998-8556
Office Hours: By appointment