MIT Department of Anthropology

Anthropology Faculty - Amy Moran-Thomas

MIT Anthropology

Amy Moran-Thomas

Amy Moran-Thomas

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Room E53-335B

617-324-7439

CV

Biography

Amy Moran-Thomas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT.  Her ethnographic research focuses on how health technologies and ecologies are designed and come to be materially embodied—often inequitably—by people in their ordinary lives. Prof. Moran-Thomas received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University in 2012. Her writings have appeared in publications such as New England Journal of Medicine and Wired.  Her first book, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic (University of California Press, 2019), offers an anthropological account of diabetes care technologies in use and the lives they shape in global perspective. The book received an award from the caregivers in Belize whose work it describes, as well as the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems.  In 2024-26, Moran-Thomas is co-leading a climate and health humanities project funded by an ACLS Digital Seed Grant, “Sugar Atlas: Counter-Mapping Diabetes from the Caribbean,” together with co-PIs Prof. Tonya Haynes and Prof. Nicole Charles. Also working on a book about embodied histories of energy, Prof. Moran-Thomas is interested in how social perspectives on design can contribute to producing fairer health technologies. More broadly, her research explores the material culture of chronic conditions; embodied aspects of planetary health; intergenerational dilemmas of responsibility; and writing public anthropology.