Emily Martin
Professor · Anthropologist
Emily Martin is an American anthropologist and professor emerita at New York University whose work has examined science, medicine, reproduction, and mental health through a cultural lens. Her books include The Woman in the Body and Bipolar Expeditions, the latter combining ethnographic research on bipolar disorder with her own experience of the condition. [3]
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Career and work
Martin has held academic positions at the University of California, Irvine, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and New York University, where she became professor of anthropology and is now professor emerita. [3][4]
Her research has ranged across medical anthropology, science and technology studies, gender, reproduction, immunity, psychology, and the cultural meanings attached to scientific knowledge. Her major books include The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (1987), Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (1994), and Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (2007). She was also the founding editor of Anthropology Now. [3]
Martin received the Society for Social Studies of Science’s John Desmond Bernal Prize in 2019 for distinguished contributions to science and technology studies. [3]
What has been publicly discussed
“I did not tell her that I too had the diagnosis because at the time this admission felt too terrible to bring to light.”
— Emily Martin [5]
