The Asian Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service is pleased to welcome Dr. Cecilia Van Hollen, a cultural and medical anthropologist, as a Teaching Professor and core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. Dr. Van Hollen will teach undergraduate and graduate courses, mentor students focused on South Asia, and advise students in the M.A. in Asian Studies Program’s Energy, Environment, and Transnational Issues of Asia concentration.
Cecilia Van Hollen specializes in social and cultural dimensions of health, medicine, and global public health policy in India. Her research explores the intersections of class, caste and gender as women seek care for reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and cancer in Tamil Nadu. Through this work, she aims to contribute to the anthropology of South Asia and provide insights for policymakers working in global and public health.
“This is a wonderful opportunity for our students to explore transnational issues such as gender and health across the region and to deepen their understanding of South Asian societies,” said Dr. Michael Green, Director of the Asian Studies Program and Chair in Contemporary Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy.
Van Hollen is the author of Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (University of California Press, 2003) and Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India (Stanford University Press, 2013). Her first book received the Association for Asian Studies’ 2005 prize for the best book in South Asia Studies. She is currently completing a third ethnography, entitled Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Health and Inequality in South India, to be published by the University of California Press and is co-editing A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Science and Technology for Wiley Blackwell. Articles on these research projects have appeared in journals such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly; Medical Anthropology; Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; Reproductive Health Matters; BioSocieties; and Economic and Political Weekly, and in international edited volumes. Van Hollen has received fellowships for these projects from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Fulbright Program, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.
“I am honored to join the talented faculty at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and excited to add to the South Asia and transnational concentrations within the Asian Studies Program” said Dr. Van Hollen, Teaching Professor in the Asian Studies Program.
Van Hollen received her B.A. from Brown University in anthropology and religious studies; an MA in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania; and a Ph.D. in medical anthropology from U.C.-Berkeley. She has been the Head of Studies for anthropology at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Prior to that she served on the faculties of anthropology at Syracuse University and the University of Notre Dame, and has been a visiting professor for both Asian Studies and Science Technology and International Affairs (STIA) in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She serves on the editorial board of Maternal and Child Health Journal. Previously, she was the Director of the Center for South Asia Studies at Syracuse University and was on the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Indian Studies and the South Asia Summer Language Institute.