My Biography
Adia Benton is an associate professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. Her first book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development Through Disease in Sierra Leone (U Minnesota Press), won the 2017 Rachel Carson Prize, which is awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to the best book in the field of Science and Technology Studies with strong social or political relevance. Her body of work addresses transnational efforts to eliminate health disparities and inequalities, and the role of ideology in global health. In addition to ongoing research on public health responses to epidemics, she has conducted research on the movement to fully incorporate surgical care into commonsense notions of “global health.” Her second book, tentatively titled The Fever Archive (U Minnesota Press), focuses on the 2013-2016 West African Ebola pandemic and its aftermath. In her other writing and media appearances, she has addressed the uses of anthropological knowledge in infectious disease outbreak response, racial hierarchies in humanitarian and development organizations, and the role of politics in professional sports. She has a PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University, an MPH in international health from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, and an AB in Human Biology from Brown University. She has held a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College and visiting positions at Oberlin College and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.