Julie Livingston

I am interested in care as a social practice and the human body as a moral condition.  Much of my research has focused on the ethical entanglements engendered by bodily vulnerability in conditions of scarce resources.   I am also a committed ethnographer, fascinated by both the intimacies created through the research process and the narrative challenges and possibilities of ethnographic writing.  My work moves across and often combines the disciplines of history, public health, and anthropology.  For the past decade and a half I have worked mainly in Botswana, in southern Africa.  My publications have explored questions of disability, chronic illness, aging, suicide, personal debt, care giving, disgust, and citizenship.  I have just completed a book about the only cancer ward in Botswana.

• 508:328 The History of Health and Healing in Africa
• 510:391/ 392 History of the AIDS Pandemic
• 508:320 The History of Southern Africa

• 510:529 Topics in the History of Sexuality: Sex, Sexuality, and Medicine
• 510:539 Colloquium in Women's History: Race and Reproduction
• 510:539 Colloquium in Women's History: The Body

• Improvising Medicine in an African Oncology Ward. Durham: Duke University Press, in press.
• Interspecies.  Special issue of Social Text (co-edited with Jasbir Puar), issue 106, spring 2011.
• Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions. Eds. Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, Steven Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
• A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and the Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship.  Eds. Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston and Peter Guarnaccia. (Studies in Social Medicine Series) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
• Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (African Systems of Thought Series) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

Chapters and Articles

• “Interspecies,” (co-authored with Jasbir Puar) Interspecies.  Special issue of Social Text issue 106, spring 2011.
• “To Vaccinate or Not?  The HPV Dilemma for Children, Citizens, Families, and Policy Makers,” (co-authored with Keith Wailoo, Steven Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz), in Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions, eds. Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, Stephen Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
• “Individualizing Risk: Medical Perils, Political Pathways, and the Cultural Framing of Vaccination under the Shadow of Sexuality,” (co-authored with Keith Wailoo, Steven Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz), in Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions, eds. Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, Stephen Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, in press).
• “HPV Skepticism and Vaccination as Governance: The U.S. and Africa as a Lens onto the North-South Divide,” (co-authored with Keith Wailoo and Barbara Cooper), in Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions, eds. Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, Stephen Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, in press).
• “Suicide, Risk, and Investment in the Heart of the African Miracle,” Cultural Anthropology, 24:4 (2009): 652-680.
• “AIDS” (co-authored with Ed Cohen), Keywords, Social Text 100th issue, 27:3 (2009): 39-42.
• “Disgust, Bodily Aesthetics, and the Ethic of Being Human in Botswana.” Africa, 78:2 (2008): 288-307.
• “Productive Misunderstandings and the Dynamism of Plural Medicine in Mid-century Bechuanaland,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 33:4 (2007): 801-810.
• “Maintaining local dependencies: elderly women and global rehabilitation agendas in Botswana.” In Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham eds., Generations and Globalization: Family, Youth, and Age in the New World Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006): 164-189.
• “Insights from an African History of Disability,” Radical History Review, Special Issue on Disability and History, 94 (2006): 111-126.
• “Introduction: Chronicles of an Accidental Death,” (co-authored with Keith Wailoo and Peter Guarnaccia) in A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and the Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship.  Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, and Peter Guarnacchia eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006),: 1-16.
• “The Politics of Second Chances: Waste, Futility, and the Debate over Jesica’s Second Transplant,” (co-authored with Keith Wailoo) in A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and the Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship.  Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, and Peter Guarnacchia eds.  (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006): 119-141.
• “AIDS as Chronic Illness: Epidemiological Transition and Health Care in Southeastern Botswana.”  African Journal of AIDS Research 3(1), 2004: 15-22.
• “Reconfiguring Old Age: Elderly Women and Concerns Over Care in Southeastern Botswana” Medical Anthropology 22(2), 2003: 205-231.
• “Pregnant Children and Half-Dead Adults: Modern Living and the Quickening Life-Cycle in Botswana.”  Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77(1), 2003: 133-162.
• “Physical Fitness and Economic Opportunity in the Bechuanaland Protectorate in the 1930’s and 1940’s.” Journal of Southern African Studies 27 (4), 2001: 793-811.

• Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Institute for Advanced Study, 2010-11
• Cultural Horizons Prize (Honorable Mention), Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2010.
• Board of Trustees Fellowship Award for Excellence in Research, Rutgers University, 2006
• Princeton Society of Fellows, Cotsen Fellowship 2003-2006 (declined).

• The American Historical Association
• The African Studies Association
• The American Anthropological Association
• The American Ethnological Society
• The Society for Cultural Anthropology
• The Society for Medical Anthropology
• The Society for the Social Study of Science