Each year the Department of Anthropology presents the Kassen Lecture. Generously supported by an annuity from the late Drs. Aileen and Julian Kassen, the lectureship invites a top female scholar in the social sciences to the department to present a lecture to the department and to the campus community. In addition to the lecture, anthropology graduate students have the opportunity to meet with the Kassen Lecturer in a small group discussion.
The 2024 Kassen Lecture will feature:
Dr. Elizabeth Carpenter-Song on January 25, 2024
Past Lectures
2022
President’s Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University
Lecture Title: “All Stigmas are Equal, but Some are More Equal than Others: Connecting Self, Social Stigma, and Global Health”
2021
Director, The Vaccine Confidence Project; Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Clinical Professor, Department of Health Metrics Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle; Guest Professor, University of Antwerp and KU Leuven, Belgium
Visiting Professor, Department of Medicine, National University of Singapore
Lecture Title: “Emotional Contagion in Times of COVID: From Fear to Hope”
2020
Professor of Anthropology, Health, and Global Affairs, Yale University
Lecture Title: “Refugee resilience and humanitarian action: knitting together research and policy”
2019
Dr. Bambi Chapin
Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Lecture Title: “Childhood in Sri Lanka: A Perspective From Twenty Years of Fieldwork”
2018
Dr. Susan Greenhalgh
John King & Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of Chinese Society, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
Lecture Title: “Big Pharma, Big Food, and the Management of the Global Obesity Epidemic”
2017
Curator of Human Health and Evolutionary Medicine, Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Lecture Title: “Moving Beyond Paleofantasies: Reconstructing Unknown Diets”
2016
Professor, Departments of Anthropology, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Medical History and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Lecture Title: “Dangerous Care: Reproductive Violence, Fast and Slow”
2015
There was no Kassen lecture this year
2014
Professor, Associate Chair, Department of Anthropology, New York University
Lecture Title: “Banking on DNA: Non-Invasive Prenatal Tests in Comparative Perspective”
2013
Professor, Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, University of Southern California
Lecture Title: “Vulnerability, Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Suffering”
2012
Marjorie Bronfman Professor in Social Studies in Medicine, Department of Anthropology, McGill University
Lecture Title: “The Alzheimer Enigma amidst Global Aging”
2011
William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale University
Lecture Title: “Global Gametes: Reproductive ‘Tourism’ and Islamic Bioethics in the High-tech Middle East”
2010
Associate Professor Anthropology, Brandeis University
Lecture Title: “Abandonment and Freedom: Elder-Care Institutions, Individualizing Subjectivities and the Ethics of Aging in Contemporary India”
2009
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School; Medical Director for Partners in Health’s (PIH) Program, Lesotho
Lecture Title: “Anthropologist as Witness; Anthropologist as Advocate: Objectivity and Responsibility in Current Anthropological Practice”
2008
Professor of Anthropology, UCLA
Lecture Title: “Enacting Ethos, Enacting Health: Parental Commentary and Everyday Life in a California Family”
2007
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Laboratory for Comparative Biology, Emory University
Lecture Title: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Cultural Models, Parenting Practices, and Child Development”
2006
Professor of Anthropology, University of Alabama
Lecture Title: “Sociocultural Dimensions of Birth Outcomes: An Anthropological Approach to the Persistent Ethnic Gap”
2005
Professor of Medical Anthropology and Health Policy, University of California at San Francisco
Lecture Title: “Volunteering in Poorer Countries: Empowerment or Exploitation?”
2003
Professor of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; teaching faculty member in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Department of Sociology, Harvard University
Lecture Title: “Indonesia Sakit (Indonesia in Pain): Interpretations of States of Crisis by Indonesian Contemporary Artists”
2002
Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University
Lecture Title: “Reproduction, Polygamy and the State: Challenges to Malian Migrants in Paris”
2001
Dr. Shirley Lindenbaum
Professor of Anthropology, Graduate Center, City University of New York
Lecture Title: “Thinking about Epidemics: Kuru, Mad Cow and Variant Cretzfeldt Jakob Disease”
2000
Professor of Anthropology and the Social Sciences in the College and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago
Lecture Title: “Alien Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and the State of the South African Postcolony”
1999
Dr. Susan Scrimshaw
Dean of the School of Public Health and Professor of Community Health Sciences and Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago
Lecture Title: “Anthropologists in Public Health: A Time of Opportunity”