Prof. Amy Moran-Thomas

Moran-Thomas is an associate professor in MIT Anthropology. 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. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University in 2012. 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, alongside others.

In 2024-26, she 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 Tonya Haynes and Nicole Charles. Also working on a book about embodied histories of energy, 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.