The Center Welcomes New Faculty
P. Sean Brotherton
P. Sean Brotherton is Assistant Professor with a joint-appointment in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. He is a medical anthropologist whose teaching and research interests are primarily in the critical study of health, medicine, subjectivity, and the body. His current research examines the impact of public health policies on everyday lives, and the role of the state in mediating the impact of macroeconomic changes in the context of the Caribbean (and, more broadly, Latin America). Theoretically, this research explores the relation between medicine, morality, and power, and how these factors influence the formation of individual and collective subjectivities.
Sean received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the Departments of Anthropology and Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). From 2004-2006, he was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow. His recent work includes “Macro-economic Change and the Biopolitics of Health in Cuba’s ŒSpecial Period” in the Journal of Latin American Anthropology.
Linda Hunt
Linda Hunt is Associate Professor of Anthropology and is jointly appointed to the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University (1992). She has conducted research both within the US and in Mexico, primarily focusing on ethical issues in health care and health research on Latino and other minority populations. She has been particularly concerned with issues of ethnicity and health, the management of chronic illness, heath disparities, and the culture of biomedicine. In her current research she is examining the way that health researchers and clinicians view minority populations, focusing on how concepts about cultural and biological difference are manifest in current health policy, interventions, professional training and research agendas. In one recent project she studied how clinicians present the opportunity for prenatal genetics diagnosis to Latinas and how those patients perceive and respond to the offer. In a current project, she is examining how a group of genetic scientists and clinicians integrate racial and ethnic variables into their work, and is considering how these endeavors both reflect and produce social constructs of racial and ethnic differences.
Ann Mongoven
Ann Mongoven has been appointed Assistant Professor in the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences with a joint affiliation in the Department of Philosophy. She received her Ph.D. in religious studies/ethics from the University of Virginia and her Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include public health preparedness, justice in health care, transplant ethics, democratic deliberation on health policy, and challenges of diversity in health care—including religious, cultural, and gender issues.
Ann formerly taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University/Bloomington, with an adjunct affiliation in the Center for Bioethics in Indianapolis. In policy arenas, she worked for a congressional commission addressing Medicare reform, served as an ethics consultant to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on transplant issues, and participated in the conceptual design of a national survey on terrorism preparedness. She completed a fellowship in women’s studies at the Harvard Divinity School and recently spent a year in Japan as an Abe Fellow conducting ethnographic research on Japanese transplant debates. Mongoven has participated in collaborative research projects addressing civic virtue (with the Markulla Center for Practical Ethics at Santa Clara University), ethnographic approaches to bioethics (with Indiana University’s Poynter Center), democratic deliberation (with the Poynter Center), and health-related philanthropy (with the IUPUI Center for Bioethics and Center on Philanthropy).
Misha Strauss
Misha Strauss joined the College of Human Medicine and the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Misha received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University in 2005. In her dissertation, A Social Account of Integrity, Misha challenges standard identity-based accounts of integrity arguing that while integrity is a matter of fidelity to one’s identity what counts as fidelity in this sense is highly contingent on the socially shared understandings of what it means to enact a particular identity. An early version of this thesis appeared in MHR in 2002.
During graduate school Misha pursued her interest in biomedical ethics through internships at the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University where her collaboration with researchers led to a publication in The Hastings Center Report.
Since moving to Michigan in 1999 to write a dissertation while raising her 3 children (ages 2, 6, and 9 years), Misha has taught in the philosophy departments of the University of Michigan, Western Michigan University, and MSU. In addition, Misha has provided consulting services to hospital ethics committees as both a paid consultant and a volunteer.
Her research interests include the intersection of social justice and personal integrity, the ethics of genetic testing, and reproductive ethics. Most recently Misha helped her husband start his own pediatric practice in Chelsea, MI—an experience that has kindled a new interest in organizational ethics as it relates to the delivery of healthcare, the use of technology to improve patient safety and enhance the patient-physician relationship, and the understanding of the primary care physician as a patient advocate within our healthcare system.