Emily Mendenhall

Professor Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist, Professor, and Director in the Science, Technology, and International Affairs Program 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), Savoring Care (2025) and Invisible Illness (2026). She has edited several Special Issues on syndemics, migration and health, syndemic theory and methods, and interembodiment. 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 Memorial 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. 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 has written extensively on the concept of the syndemics. She wrote the first full length book on a syndemic, Syndemic Suffering, and led a Series of articles on syndemics in The Lancet in 2017. She also 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 were published in Nature Human Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, SSM-MH, Global Public Health, and Psychological Medicine.

In 2025, Mendenhall launched a new publication called Science Politics - a publication that matches academic rigor with journalistic storytelling to address how scientific knowledge is transformed through politics, society, and environments. Science Politics engages solutions-focused journalism to focus on how we can better understand and address changing politics around water, wind, food, carbon, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, data, energy, and health affect people's safety, livelihoods, and relationships. Science Politics published 3-5 new articles every week at sciencepolitics.org as well as special collections. They published The Future of Development in May 2026 and Food Forward in October 2026.

Professor Mendenhall is also affiliated with the faculty in the Department of Anthropology and Department of Global Health. She is also affiliate faculty of Medical Humanities, Disability Studies, and the Global Health Institute.