Emily Mendenhall

Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program

Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service

Background

Dr. Mendenhall received her Master of Public Health from the Hubert Department of Global Health in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in 2006. She went on to earn her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2012. Under the supervision of Dr. Rebecca Seligman (also an Emory Medical Anthropology PhD alumni), Dr. Mendenhall successfully completed her dissertation titled “Stories at the Border of Mind and Body: Stress, Distress, and Diabetes among Mexican and Mexican-American Women in Chicago”. This research was further published as a book titled Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women. 

In 2017, Dr. Mendenhall was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology. Her book Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV published in 2019 was the culmination of decades of research on people’s perception, experience, and embodiment of trauma and diabetes through personal stories.This work was also part of a series of articles she led on syndemics published in The Lancet in 2017. Her newest book is titled Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji and investigates the responses to COVID-19 among people from her hometown in northwest Iowa.

Dr. Mendehall was previously a visiting Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She was also an NIH Fogarty Scholar at the Public Health Foundation of India.

She is currently involved in ongoing research on syndemics in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the Principle Investigator of the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center study “Soweto Syndemics” at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she holds an honorary appointment. She is also one of the co-Editors-in-Chief of Social Science and Medicine – Mental Health, a journal launched in 2021 that provides an international and interdisciplinary forum for social science research on mental and behavioral health.

EDUCATION

• BA – Davidson College – 2004
• MPH – Emory University – 2006
• PhD – Northwestern University – 2012

PUBLICATIONS & Projects

• Emily Mendenhall. Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji. Vanderbilt University Press, 2022.
• Lauren Carruth, Mohamed Jama Ateye, Ahmed Nassir, Farah Mussa Hosh And Emily Mendenhall. “Diabetes In A Humanitarian Crisis: Atypical Clinical Presentations And Challenges To Clinical- And Community-based Management Among Somalis In Ethiopia.” Global Public Health, 15, 6 (June 2, 2020): 828-839. DOI: doi: 10.1080/17441692.2020.1718735.
• Emily Mendenhall And Merrill Singer. “What Constitutes A Syndemic? Methods, Contexts, And Framing From 2019.” Current Opinion In Hiv And Aids, Publish Ahead of Print (May 13, 2020) DOI: doi: 10.1097/COH.0000000000000628.
• Edna N. Bosire, Emily Mendenhall And Lesley Jo Weaver. “Comorbid Suffering: Breast Cancer Survivors In South Africa.” Qualitative Health Research, 30, 6 (May 1, 2020): 917-926. DOI: doi: 10.1177/1049732320911365.
• Emily Mendenhall. Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.
• Emily Mendenhall. Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women. New York, NY: Routledge, 2012.