Cecilia Van Hollen is a Teaching Professor in the Asian Studies Program of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She teaches courses and advises students in the Asian Studies Program and for the Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) program. Van Hollen is a cultural and medical anthropologist whose research focuses empirically on social and cultural dimensions of health, medicine, the body, and global and public health policy in India, and theoretically on globalization and modernity; feminism and gender studies; critical medical anthropology; and social inequality and power. Her ethnographic projects have explored the intersections of class, caste and gender as women seek care for reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and cancer in Tamil Nadu, South India. Through this work, she aims to contribute to the anthropology of South Asia and provide insights for policymakers working in global and public health.

Van Hollen is the author of Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (University of California Press, 2003); Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India (Stanford University Press, 2013); and Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality and Health in South India (University of California Press, 2022). Her first book received the Association for Asian Studies’ 2005 prize for the best book in South Asia Studies. She is co-editing the handbook, A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology, for Wiley Blackwell (Forthcoming 2023). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly; Medical Anthropology; Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; Reproductive Health Matters; BioSocieties; Economic and Political Weekly, and in international edited volumes. She has received fellowships for her research from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Fulbright Program, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Van Hollen served as the Head of Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and on the faculties of anthropology at Syracuse University and the University of Notre Dame. She was Director of the U.S. Department of Education-funded Center for South Asia Studies at Syracuse University and served on the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Indian Studies and the South Asia Summer Language Institute.

Education

University of California-Berkeley - Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania - M.A.
Brown University - B.A.