Faculty Profiles

Betsey Brada is a cultural anthropologist specializing in health and medicine in southern Africa. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Chicago. She comes to Reed this fall from Princeton University where she taught and mentored students in the interdisciplinary Program in Global Health and Health Policy. Her research and teaching interests include: medical anthropology; the anthropology of pedagogy and expertise; and the ethnography and history of Africa. Her book manuscript in progress argues that global health, rather than a unidirectional flow of moral practice and expert knowledge from North to South, is an imaginative framework that organizes the space, time, and ethics of encounter. Based on ethnographic research at the intersection of Botswana's national public HIV treatment program and the private U.S.-based partnerships supporting it, Betsey analyzes the pedagogic projects by which visiting American experts and students as well as local clinicians and patients come to regard themselves and one another in terms of this framework. An article drawn from this project appeared in American Ethnologist and received the 2013 Clark Taylor Paper Prize. A second ethnographic project currently underway examines the development of Botswana's new and only medical school, the first African medical school to be founded after the advent of public HIV treatment and the transnational engagements that have accompanied it.