Julie Livingston

The Body, Southern Africa, Interspecies, Gender, Development, Economic Growth/Degrowth, Public Health

American Anthropological Association, African Studies Association, Society for Medical Anthropology, Society for Cultural Anthropology, PEN America Center

Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Her work is at the intersection of history, anthropology, and public health. Livingston is concerned with the human body as a moral condition and mode of consciousness; care as a social practice; taxonomy and the relationships that subvert or upend it; the relationship between species; African thought and political and moral imagination; and the environmental consequences of capitalism and economic growth. She is also interested in writing and questions of formal expression.

She is the author of Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke University Press, 2019); Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press, 2012), and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press, 2005). She has also coedited a number of books and special journal issues. Livingston’s essays and articles range across topics including suicide and debt, aging, cancer, disability, disgust, HIV/AIDS, interspecies, and medical photography. The recipient of numerous awards, she has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and in 2013 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

At the undergraduate level she teaches courses in the history of Africa, race and reproduction, and the cancer industrial complex, among other topics. At the graduate level she works with students on topics related to the body, interspecies, disability, the history of science, medicine, and technology, biopolitics, and development. Livingston is a member of the NYU Prison Education Program steering committee.

Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professorship, NYU 2019

MacArthur Fellowship, The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, 2013-2018

The Howard and Phyllis Friedman Fellowship for an Inclusive Economy, The Mesa Refuge, October 2017

William H. Welch Medal, The American Association for the History of Medicine, 2014

The Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, The Society for Humanistic Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 2013

The Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems, Royal Anthropological Institute 2012

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Institute for Advanced Study, invited fellow and co-convener of a research group on “Professional Dilemmas of Clinical Practice in Africa,” 2010-2011

Cultural Horizons Prize, Society for Cultural Anthropology (Honorable Mention), 2010

Board of Trustees Fellowship Award for Scholarly Excellence, Rutgers University, 2006

Princeton University Society of Fellows, Cotsen Fellowship, 2003-2006 (declined)

Harvard University, Derek Bok Center, Distinction in Teaching, 2000, 2001

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship, 1998-1999