Emily Mendenhall, PhD

Professor, School of Foreign Service

Emily Mendenhall, PhD, MPH, is a medical anthropologist and Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She has published widely at the boundaries of anthropology, psychology, medicine, and public health. She has published several books, including Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women (2012), Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives (2015), Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV (2019), and Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (2022). Professor Mendenhall also recently completed a four-year study of syndemics in Soweto, South Africa (See: Soweto Syndemics). Publications from this project span many topics, including syndemics, mental health during the pandemic, psychometrics, healing through God, spirituality and the Church, and flourishing.

Dr. Mendenhall collaborates with Dr. Shabab Wahid, Dr. Edna Bosire, Ben Oestericher, and Janeeta Shaukat on the Ecological Grief in Kenya project.