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.  

Research

Health Between Generations 

Professor Moran-Thomas’ first book, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic (2019; open access here), traces the planetary diabetes epidemic as part of the ongoing legacies of sweetness and power. It chronicles five hundred years of sugar’s histories, and follows the care work of families managing chronic conditions and their struggles to recover from diabetic injuries such as organ failure and amputated limbs — health advocacy movements followed in relation to the material afterlives of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Central America. The book’s storytelling structure of crónicas follows patients’ travails and "slow care" as they navigate unequal global infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. The stories and routines they shared help to show diabetes’ tasks of maintenance and repair as entwined issues of caring for bodies, technologies, histories, data, infrastructures, ancestors, atmospheres, and ecosystems.

Building on this work about the social lives of carbohydrates (especially sugar), Professor Moran-Thomas is also working on a project about embodied aspects of hydrocarbons (especially mining in west Pennsylvania.) It again draws on kinship as critical method — this time writing from her own families’ histories, with an excerpt appearing in the upcoming volume Scholars and Their Kin. In its civic technoscience aspects, this wider research also involves launching a community-guided underground safety mapping project— a new collaboration between Anthropology and Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences to study small local earthquakes and their potential health implications— supported by the ESI Climate Justice Program and the Center for Coalfield Justice.

As part of her work on health between generations, Professor Moran-Thomas is also co-leading collective work to reexamine the ongoing legacies and implications of unethical medical experiments conducted by U.S. physicians in Guatemala. In 2024-25, this writing and research is being supported by a SHASS Dean’s Grant. 
 

Social Lives of Medical Objects

Prof. Moran-Thomas’ work often combines ethnography and cultural history to examine the social lives of health objects. She has written about global breakdowns of glucose meters and the problem of equitable design; lives shaped by various types of insulin, which remain inaccessible to many on its hundredth anniversary; and struggles to maintain bodies and infrastructures through use of dialysis devices, oxygen chambers for diabetic wound care, and prosthetic limbs. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she extended these material questions to explore the forgotten history of more equitable oximeters. Her essay on unequal inaccuracies in pulse oximeters in Boston Review prompted the first clinical study of the problem using hospital data, now part of worldwide calls to create fairer “wearable” devices. Co-designing teaching materials on the subject and serving on the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Use of Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical Research, Prof. Moran-Thomas is interested in how social perspectives on design can contribute to producing more equitable health technologies.

Selected Publications

Teaching

21A.00
Introduction to Anthropology: Comparing Human Cultures

Through the comparative study of different cultures, anthropology explores fundamental questions about what it means to be human. Seeks to understand how culture shapes societies, from the smallest island in the South Pacific to the largest Asian metropolis, and affects the way institutions work, from scientific laboratories to Christian mega-churches. Provides a framework for analyzing diverse facets of human experience, such as gender, ethnicity, language, politics, economics, and art.

21A.301
Disease and Health: Culture, Society, and Ethics

From a cross cultural and global perspective, examines how medicine is practiced, with particular emphasis on biomedicine.  Analyzes medical practice as a cultural system, focusing on the human and social side of things.  Considers how people in different societies think of disease, health, body, and mind.

21A.305
Drugs, Politics, and Culture

Explores the relationship between drugs and society in a cross-cultural perspective, looking at intersections between drugs and phenomena such as poverty, religion, technology, colonialism, conflict, and global capitalism. Examines histories behind the use and abuse of various substances, including opium, cocaine, and prescription pharmaceuticals. Considers why different societies prohibit and sanction different drugs; the politics of markets and clinical trials; and how social conditions affect the circulation of medicines in global health.

21A.311
The Social Lives of Medical Objects

Explores the theories and assumptions built into objects meant to improve health. Students read and discuss case studies that follow the often unexpected ways intended intervention objects are designed and developed, globally travel, and at times become part of people's everyday lives. Studies include a broad range of medical materials and development technologies, such as penicillin, anti-malarial drugs, water pumps, air filters, prosthetic limbs, glucose meters, scales, DDT insecticides, bednets, and micro-nutrient pills.

21A.312
Planetary Change and Human Health

Explores intersections between health of the planet and the health of human beings. Drawing upon case studies of growing ecological crisis around the world, topics include the societal and human health implications of global climate change, sea level rise, weather disasters and fossil fuel pollution; connections between the health of plants, animals, microbes, and people; shifting industrial food systems and human nutrition; representations of race and indigeneity amid struggles for environmental justice; waste disposal and nuclear afterlives; and debates surrounding controversial issues such as geoengineering and climate AI. Students will practice inserting environmental sciences in dialogue with toolkits from the social sciences and humanities to explore the uneven social worlds that shape how science gets traction (or not) in policy and law.

21A.319J/STS.330J
History and Anthropology of Medicine and Biology

Explores recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of medicine and biology. Topics might include interaction of disease and society; science, colonialism, and international health; impact of new technologies on medicine and the life sciences; neuroscience and psychiatry; race, biology and medicine. Specific emphasis varies from year to year.

21A.404
Living Through Climate Change 

Uses anthropological approaches to better understand those social and political forces shaping climate change as well as proposed solutions, including those leveraging technical and scientific tools. Examines how climate change is bound up, historically and today, with other processes — including land dispossession, pollution, resource insecurity, industrial agriculture, eroding infrastructure, racial housing discrimination, and job loss. Explores perspectives on social justice, community engagement, and lived experiences of climate change – and their implications for science, engineering, and industry. Engages ethnographic case studies that address unequal climate impacts, the effects of policy, and ongoing mitigation efforts unfolding in agriculture, coastal engineering, architecture, urban planning, global migration, and historical repair. Includes field trips during class time.

21A.500J/STS.075J
Technology and Culture

Examines the intersections of technology, culture, and politics in a variety of social and historical settings ranging from 19th-century factories to 21st-century techno dance floors, from Victorian London to anything-goes Las Vegas. Discussions and readings organized around three questions: what cultural effects and risks follow from treating biology as technology; how computers have changed the way we think about ourselves and others; and how politics are built into our infrastructures. Explores the forces behind technological and cultural change; how technological and cutural artifacts are understood and used by different communities; and whether, in what ways, and for whom technology has produced a better world.

21A.508
Culture and Ethics in Science Fiction Worlds

Examines the ethical and controversial aspects of technology's impacts on society, as approached through the lens of science fiction and media. From novels such as Kindred to films like Sleep Dealer, the social inequalities and political complexities portrayed in science fiction worlds offer a launch point to discuss the uneasy aspects and uneven reach of science, technology, and medicine. Covers issues including gene editing, data privacy, border surveillance, human experimentation, environmental crises, war industries, and the impacts of AI.

21A.829J/STS.360J 
Ethnography 

Practicum style course introduces students to ethnographic methods and writing in global health research. Organized around interviewing and observational assignments. Students develop a bibliography of  anthropological and ethnographic writing relevant to their project, and write a short paper about integrating ethnographic methods into a future research project. Preference to HASTS students; open to others with permission of instructor.

Awards

News

Exploring the Unexpected Social Questions Behind Everyday Medical Devices

Danna Lorch | MIT News

June 8, 2023

MIT News article, originally printed in SHASS Said and Done magazine, "In The Classroom" profile of 21A.311: The Social Lives of Medical Objects, a course taught by Amy Moran-Thomas, Associate Professor of Anthropology and the 2022 winner of the Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award.

Amy Moran-Thomas receives the Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award

Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications | Senior Writer: Kathryn O'Neill | Editorial and Design Director: Emily Hiestand

April 26, 2022

MIT anthropologist Moran-Thomas “stands out in this field by bringing a humanistic approach into dialogue with environmental and science studies to investigate how bodily health is shaped by social well-being at the community level and further conditioned by localized planetary imbalances." 
— from the Edgerton Award Selection Committee statement

 

Amy Moran-Thomas, the Alfred Henry and Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Associate Professor of Anthropology, has received the 2021-22 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award in recognition of her “exceptional commitment to innovative and collaborative interdisciplinary approaches to resolving inequitable impacts on human health,” according to a statement released today by the 2019-20 Edgerton Award Selection Committee.

Associate Professor Amy Moran-Thomas receives 2021 Victor Turner Prize from Society for Humanistic Anthropology

December 21, 2021

MIT Anthropology Associate Professor Amy Moran-Thomas wins the 2021 Victor Turner Prize for her book, "Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic."

Oximeters Used to Be Designed for Equity. What Happened?

Amy Moran-Thomas | WIRED Magazine | Image Credit: Amy Moran-Thomas

June 8, 2021

The gray oximeter sitting on my kitchen table looks like a record player. A product of the 1970s, its alarm for low blood oxygen levels is set by analog dial. I bought it on eBay late last year, after writing a story about the racial bias built into oximetry for the Boston Review. A professor of medicine at Yale, Meir Kryger, reached out afterward with a suggestion: I should also look into the models predating contemporary pulse oximeters, specifically one made by Hewlett-Packard. It’s a technological dinosaur, but in certain ways, its inner workings are more advanced than many devices that measure blood oxygen in hospitals today.

Amy Moran-Thomas "On planetary change and human health"

SHASS News | Image: Hurricane Hattie Belize, by Delvin "Pen" Cayetano, 1996, Oil on Canvas

December 8, 2020

MIT anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas reflects on the deep connection.

“When I think of health now, I think of the disarray in bigger ecosystems and infrastructures that is also landing in human bodies.”

Image: Hurricane Hattie Belize, by Delvin "Pen" Cayetano, 1996, Oil on Canvas; ©2018 Artists Rights Society, New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; reproduced with permission | Image of painted Blue/Green swirling waves with "Hattie" painted in bold capsred at top 

Associate Professor Amy Moran-Thomas receives a Ruth A. and James Levitan Prize

December 20, 2019

Associate Professor Amy Moran-Thomas is the recipient of a 2020 James A. and Ruth Levitan Prize. The prize is awarded to instructors in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) in recognition of their outstanding contributions to research.

Associate Professor Amy Moran-Thomas featured on MIT News

December 20, 2019

Associate Professor Amy Moran-Thomas' research is featured on MIT News. Her research on the global diabetes epidemic is the focus of her new book, Traveling with Sugar (Univ. of CA Press).