Professor Atwood Gaines has been appointed Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, effective 1st January 2022. Professor Gaines retired from the department on 1st July 2021 after 38 years on our faculty. Woody Gaines earned his MA, C.Phil and PhD in cultural anthropology and an MPH at UC Berkeley. He taught at San Francisco State University and Duke University, prior to joining the CWRU Department of Anthropology in 1983.

Dr. Gaines’ research interests span many domains in medical anthropology, including health and social identity, ethnopsychiatry, bioethics, gerontology, and the cultural studies of science. He has published widely, including his 1992 book, Ethnopsychiatry, and two volumes edited with Robert Hahn called Physicians of Western Medicine (1982, 1985). He published nearly 80 articles in leading journals and served as Editor-in-Chief of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry: An International Journal of Cross-Cultural Health Research from 2007-2018.

Woody Gaines also supervised 20 anthropology PhD students and served on dissertation committees for more than a dozen students. In the classroom,  Woody taught countless CWRU students – anthropology majors and nonmajors alike – sharing his insights into the important contributions of medical anthropology to our understanding of the world.

Thank you for your contributions to anthropology at CWRU and best wishes for your retirement!