Bridget M. Haas
Assistant Professor
Contact
bmh7@case.edu
Mather Memorial Building Room 245
About
Bridget M. Haas holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California-San Diego, with specific training in medical and psychological anthropology. Her research approaches immigration policies and institutions as key determinants of health and mental health. She is especially interested in how immigration policies in the United States contribute to the production of suffering and distress for migrants, in ways that are often routinized and rendered invisible.
Her book Suspended Lives: Navigating Everyday Violence in the US Asylum System, was published in 2023 by the University of California Press. This book draws on longitudinal ethnographic research among Cameroonian and other African asylum seekers in the midwestern United States, to explore the social, emotional, and embodied effects of being embedded in the complex, criminalizing, and protracted US asylum system. She is also the co-editor, with Amy Shuman, of Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum (Ohio University Press, 2019). Her scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed outlets such as Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Ethos, Social Science and Medicine, Child Abuse and Neglect, among others.
Dr. Haas is currently pursuing research on newly arrived refugees’ experiences of domestic medical examinations (mandatory screenings for newly arrived refugees in the US); mental health interventions for local refugee and asylum-seeking survivors of torture; and the impact of resettlement on refugees’ family systems and familial relationships.
In addition to her primary line of research on the intersection of immigration and health/mental health, Dr. Haas also maintains a research agenda on child and family well-being. She has been involved in numerous interdisciplinary research projects surrounding child maltreatment.
At CWRU, Dr. Haas teaches introductory courses on medical and psychological anthropology, as well as courses on migration and health, anthropology of childhood and the family, and global mental health.