Emily Mendenhall

Professor Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist, Guggenheim Fellow, and Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She has published widely in anthropology, medicine, psychology, and public health. Her books include Syndemic Suffering (2012), Global Mental Health ( 2015), Rethinking Diabetes (2019), Unmasked (2022), and Invisible Illness (2025). She has edited several Special Issues on syndemics, migration and health, and syndemic theory and methods. Professor Mendenhall was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2017. In 2023, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Mendenhall’s new book, Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid, is a moving cultural history of disability and a powerful call-to-action to change how our medical system and society supports those with complex chronic conditions. This book considers, from lupus to Lyme, how invisible illnesses are often dismissed by everyone but the sufferers. Why does the medical establishment continually insist that, when symptoms are hard to explain, they are probably just in your head? Inspired by work with long Covid patients, this book traces the story of contested conditions from hysteria to long Covid to show why both research and practice fail so many. Mendenhall points out disconnects between the reality of chronic disease—which typically involves multiple intersecting problems resulting in unique, individualized illness—and the assumptions of medical providers, who behave as though illnesses have uniform effects for everyone. And while invisible illnesses have historically been associated with white middle-class women, being believed that you are sick is even more difficult when you’re Black, trans, poor, young, disabled, or undocumented. Weaving together cultural history with intimate interviews, Invisible Illness lifts up the experiences of those living with complex illness to expose the failures of the American healthcare system—and how we can do better. She has written about Long COVID in Social Science and Medicine, Scientific American, and Current History.

Mendenhall’s award-winning trade book Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji investigates how people responded to COVID-19 in her hometown in northwest Iowa. Unmasked explores political priorities, cultural squabbles, and business interests that undermined public health efforts when no mandates were in place. Mendenhall has written about this research in Vox, Scary Mommy, Scientific American, and academic journals, including Social Science and Medicine and Global Public Health. Her work has been highlighted in COVID Quickly at Scientific American, Talk of Iowa, Psychology Today, Campaign for the American Reader, Schools of Foreign Service News, The E’Ville Good, and Iowa Science Interface. Unmasked was awarded the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for best book of the year in art and medicine from Vanderbilt University Press in 2022.

Professor Mendenhall recently completed a four year study of syndemics in Soweto, South Africa. The study was derailed in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, influencing writing in Scientific American, Think Global Health, and The Conversation. Publications from this project span many topics, including syndemics, mental health during the pandemic, psychometrics, healing through God, spirituality and the Church, and flourishing. Some of these articles have been published in Nature Human Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, SSM-MH, Global Public Health, and Psychological Medicine. A summary of this work can be found on the Nature Social and Behavioral Sciences Blog.

At Georgetown, she leads the global health concentration in the the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program in the School of Foreign Service. She is also affiliated with the faculty in the Department of Anthropology and Department of Global Health.