Joao biehl biography sample

Who is João Biehl?

João GuilhermeBiehl is Susan Dod BrownProfessor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he is also the Co-Director of the Program of GlobalHealth and HealthPolicy and where he holds an Old DominionProfessorship at the Council of Humanities, as well as being a Visitor at the School of SocialSciences of the Institute for Advanced Study.

He earned a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1999) and a doctorate in Religion from the Graduate Theological Union (1996). He has also written 4 books in Portuguese: "Entre as Montanhas" ("Between the Mountains") (Literalis, 2004), "Clandestino: No Cotidiano e na Teologia" (“Clandestine: Theology and Ordinary Life ”) (Vozes/Sinodal, 1990), "Igual pra Igual: Um Diálogo Crítico entre a Teologia da Libertação e as Teologias Negra, Feminista e Pacifista" ("From Equal to Equal: A Critical Dialogue between Latin American Liberation Theology and Black, Feminist and Pacifist Theologies”) (Vozes/Sinodal, 1987) and "Tudo a Ver: Uma Viagem Sem Roteiros pela América do Sul" ("All to See: A Journey through South America”) (Sinodal, 1987.) Biehl is the co-editor of "When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health" (Princeton University Press) and Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (University of California Press 2007) and of the book series "Critical Global Health" (Duke University Press.) He is writing the history of a fratricidal war—the Mucker war—that took place among German immigrants in 1874 in southern Brazil.

He is also the Co-Director of the Program in Global Health and Health Policy and holds an Old Dominion Professorship in the Council of Humanities.

While advancing the conceptual terrain of an anthropology of becoming, Biehl seeks to restore a sense of multiplicity and possibility to ethics, politics, and storytelling.

Biehl has authored Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. His work has been published in American Ethnologist; Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry; Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; Public Culture; and Social Text.

"Vita" garnered six major book awards, including the Margaret Mead Award of the American Anthropological Association.

Biehl was a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine from 1998 to 2000.

João Biehl has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2002–03 and 2005–06); and a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris (2004).

His research has been supported by grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Princeton's Health Grand Challenges Initiative, and Princeton's Council of International Teaching and Research Foundation.

How do we teach when a pandemic undoes our taken-for-granted ways of knowing, acting, and relating?
Every spring semester class was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which instituted campus lockdowns around the world and forced instruction to move online or to be halted altogether. 
But Medical Anthropology might be the rare Princeton University course that was actually deepened and enriched by the life-altering circumstances of the pandemic, since it focuses on the interconnectedness of disease, the body politic, and the arts of care, as well as the power of storytelling in the face of the unknown. 
Turbulent forces unfolding around us made key medical anthropology concepts—such as structural violence, racialization, technologies of invisibility, local biologies, body techniques, human plasticity, experimentality, pharmaceuticalization, and technologies of caregiving—markedly meaningful and relevant.

These books are ethnographic studies of the experience and treatment of mental illness and AIDS, respectively. Both Vita and Will to Live explore new regimes of normalcy and the geographies of access and marginalization that have emerged alongside pharmaceutical globalization, paying particular attention to the proliferation of zones of social abandonment along with the growing pharmaceuticalization of health in a transforming Brazil.

Will to Live was awarded the Wellcome Medal of Britain’s Royal Anthropological Society and the Diana Forsythe Prize of the American Anthropological Association. "Will to Live" received the Wellcome Medal of Britain's Royal Anthropological Society and the Diana Forsythe Prize of the American Anthropological Association. He held the Harold Willis Dodds Presidential University Preceptorship at Princeton and was a Member of both the School of Social Science and the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study.

He is currently coordinating a research and teaching partnership between Princeton University and the University of São Paulo centered on global health and the anthropology of health and medicine, along with a collaborative network on "Race and Citizenship in the Americas." He has been on the executive committee of 4 programs at Princeton (the Program of Latin American Studies, the Center for the Study of Religion, the Community-Based Learning Initiative, and Examination and Standing) and was the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology from 2004-2005 and 2011-2012.