“Core Faculty Member, Dr. Emily Mendenhall, awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship”

Posted in Announcements Scholarship  |  Tagged Emily Mendenhall, Scholarship 2023

Our very own core faculty member, Dr. Emily Mendenhall, has been selected as a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient for her work in medical anthropology and public health.

Per the Guggenheim Fellowship website, the “fellowships are intended for mid-career individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts and exhibit great promise for their future endeavors”

Her books include Syndemic Suffering (new window) (2012), Global Mental Health (new window) ( 2015), Rethinking Diabetes (new window) (2019), and Unmasked (new window) (2022). 

Her most recent novel Unmasked is the story of what happened in Okoboji, Mendenhall’s small Iowan hometown during the COVID summer of 2020. It was during this time that the popular Summertime vacation destination declared a pandemic hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town.

Unmasked describes the local political failures and a community’s (dis)belief about the virus that lead to rejections of public health guidance, revealing a thought-provoking narrative on isolationist popular beliefs can be found in small American communities.

Read more about Dr. Mendenhall’s work on her GU360 Profile.