Cecilia Van Hollen

Dr. Cecilia Van Hollen is a social-cultural and medical anthropologist specializing in South Asia. She is a Teaching Professor in the Asian Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and also teaches for the Science, Technology and International Affairs program at Georgetown. Her research focuses empirically on social and cultural dimensions of health, medicine, the body, and global and public health policy in India, and theoretically on globalization and modernity; feminism and gender studies; critical medical anthropology; and social inequality and power. Her ethnographic projects examine the intersections of gender, class and caste in Tamil Nadu, South India through studies of maternal healthcare, HIV/AIDS and reproduction, and reproductive cancer care for women. She aims to both expand the horizons of anthropology and South Asia Studies and to provide insights to policymakers working in global and public health.

Dr. Van Hollen has published three single-authored ethnographic books—Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (University of California Press, 2003), Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India (Stanford University Press, 2013), and Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality and Health in South India (University of California Press, 2022). She is the lead co-editor of the handbook, A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology (Wiley Blackwell, 2023). Her work has also been published in numerous journals, including Medical Anthropology Quarterly; Medical Anthropology; Biosocieties; Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; Economic and Political Weekly; Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, and the Journal of Global Oncology, and in numerous edited volumes.

She was a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has received two fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, two fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), and a grant from Princeton University’s Institute for Citizens and Scholars, among others.

Prior to joining the Georgetown University faculty, she served as the Head of Studies of the Anthropology program at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and was an Anthropology professor in the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and at the University of Notre Dame.

Dr. Van Hollen received her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-San Francisco; her M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. with a double major in Religious Studies and Anthropology from Brown University.

For more information, please visit Cecilia Coale Van Hollen’s website at: https://www.ceciliavanhollen.com/