Marcia C. Inhorn

Marcia C. Inhorn
File:Marcia-c-inhorn.jpeg Marcia C. Inhorn at Yale, 2009.
Born	1957
Residence	New Haven, CT
Nationality	United States
Education	PhD, MPH
Alma mater	UC Berkeley
Employer	Yale University University of Michigan
Title	William K. Lanman Jr. professor
Board member of	Elected Fellow, Society for Applied Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 2007. Chair, Council on Middle East Studies, Yale University, 2008 - present. Editor, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies
Spouse(s)	Kirk Hooks
Children	Carl & Justine
Awards	Diana Forsythe Prize for Outstanding Feminist Anthropological Research on Work, Science, and Technology, 2007. Eileen Basker Prize award for
Website	www.marciainhorn.com

Marcia Claire Inhorn is a medical anthropologist and William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University. A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn conducts research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America over the past 20 years.

Before joining the Yale faculty in 2008, Inhorn was a professor of medical anthropology at the University of Michigan and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Inhorn served as president of the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. She has also served as Chair of Yale's Council on Middle East Studies (2008-2011) and of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan (2004-2006).

Research

Egypt

A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn has conducted research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTS) in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America over the past 20 years. She is the first anthropologist to study infertility in the non-Western world, beginning with research in the late 1980s among the urban Egyptian poor. There, she discovered the complex “quest for conception”—involving both traditional and Western biomedicine—undertaken by many infertile women in an attempt to overcome their stigmatizing childlessness. She also theorized infertility as a form of “lived patriarchy” for poor women, even though many poor husbands in Egypt were supportive and loving toward their infertile wives. Returning to Egypt in the mid-1990s, Inhorn examined the introduction of both in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) (a variant of IVF to overcome male infertility) in that country. She discovered the numerous structural, ideological, and practical obstacles and apprehensions faced by urban Egyptian elites in their struggles to overcome infertility through the use of ARTs. These two research projects resulted in three books on the impact of infertility, childlessness, reproductive medicine, and the globalization of ARTs to Egypt at the turn of the century.

Lebanon

Since 2000, Inhorn has undertaken three more major research projects on Middle Eastern infertility and assisted reproduction, with support of the U.S. Department of Education. Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Program and the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation. As a Visiting Research Professor at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon in 2003, Inhorn examined the social impact of male infertility in the era of ICSI. Inhorn discovered that male infertility is highly prevalent in the Middle East and is probably genetically related to consanguineous (cousin) marriage. Increasingly, Middle Eastern men are viewing male infertility as a medical condition to be overcome through ICSI, and are demonstrating their “emergent masculinities” through their engagements with emerging ARTs. These ARTs include new forms of gamete donation, as well as surrogacy, which have been allowed by some Shia Islamic religious authorities in Iran and Lebanon.

Editorships

Inhorn is the current and founding editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS). She is also associate editor for population and health of the journal Global Public Health, and co-editor of the "Fertility, Reproduction, and Sexuality" series at Berghahn Books. She is also editor or co-editor of eight volumes on medical anthropology, gender, reproduction, and the Middle East.

Publications

Books

• Inhorn, Marcia C. (2015). Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai. Duke University Press.
• . Winner of the Diana Forsythe Prize for Outstanding Feminist Anthropological Research on Work, Science, and Technology, including Biomedicine; Society for the Anthropology of Work and The Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC), American Anthropological Association, 2007
• . Winner of the Eileen Basker Prize for Outstanding Research on Gender and Health, Society for Medical Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 1995.

Edited volumes

• (Winner of Council on Anthropology and Reproduction, Society for Medical Anthropology, Book Prize for “Most Notable Recent Edited Collection").

Selected book chapters

• Inhorn, Marcia C. (2010) "’Assisted’ Reproduction in Global Dubai: Reproductive Tourists and Their Helpers." In Globalized Motherhood, eds. Wendy Chavkin and JaneMaree Maher, pp. 180-202. New York: Routledge Press.
• Inhorn, Marcia C., and Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli (2010) "Male Infertility, Chronicity, and the Plight of Palestinian Men in Israel and Lebanon," in Chronic Conditions, Fluid States: Globalization and the Anthropology of Illness, eds. Lenore Manderson and Carolyn Smith-Morris, pp. 77–95. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Birenbaum-Carmeli, Daphna, and Marcia C. Inhorn (2009) "Introduction: Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes: Global Encounters with New Biotechnologies." In Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes: Global Encounters with New Biotechnologies, eds. Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli and Marcia C. Inhorn, pp. 1–26. New York: Berghahn Books.
• Inhorn, Marcia C. (2009) "Middle Eastern Masculinities in the Age of Assisted Reproductive Technologies." In Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes: Global Encounters with New Biotechnologies, eds. Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli and Marcia C. Inhorn, pp. 86–110. New York: Berghahn Books.
• Inhorn, Marcia C., Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Tine, Goldberg, Helene, and Maruska La Cour Mosegaard (2009)"Introduction—The Second Sex in Reproduction? Men, Sexuality, and Masculinity." In Reconceiving the Second Sex: Men, Masculinity, and Reproduction, eds. Marcia C. Inhorn, Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Helene Goldberg, and Maruska La Cour Mosegaard, pp. 1–17. New York: Berghahn Books.
• Inhorn, Marcia C., Rosario Ceballo, and Robert Nachtigall (2009) "Marginalized, Invisible, and Unwanted: American Minority Struggles with Infertility and Assisted Conception." In Ethnicity, Infertility and Reproductive Technologies, eds. Lorraine Culley, Nicky Hudson, and Floor B. van Rooij, pp. 181–197. London: Earthscan Books.
• Hahn, Robert A., and Marcia C. Inhorn (2009) "Introduction: Anthropology and Public Health." In Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society, eds. Robert A. Hahn and Marcia C. Inhorn, pp. 1–31. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Inhorn, Marcia C. (2007) “Loving Your Infertile Muslim Spouse: Notes on the Globalization of IVF and Its Romantic Commitments in Sunni Egypt and Shi’ite Lebanon.” In Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World, eds. Mark B. Padilla, Jennifer S. Hirsch, Miguel Munoz-Laboy, Robert Sember, and Richard G. Parker, pp. 139–160. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. ISBN 978-0826515858
• Inhorn, Marcia C., and Aditya Bharadwaj. (2007) "Reproductively Disabled Lives: Infertility, Stigma, and Suffering in Egypt and India." Disability in Local and Global Worlds, eds. Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds Whyte, pp. 78–106. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Inhorn, Marcia C. (2003) "The Risks of Test-tube Baby Making in Egypt." Risk, Culture, and Health Inequality: Shifting Perceptions of Danger and Blame, eds. Barbara Herr Harthorn and Laury Oaks, pp. 57–78. Westport, CT: Praeger.
• Van Balen, Frank, and Marcia C. Inhorn (2002) "Introduction—Interpreting Infertility: A View from the Social Sciences." In Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies, eds. Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen, pp. 3–23. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Inhorn, Marcia C. (2002) "The ‘Local’ Confronts the ‘Global’: Infertile Bodies and New Reproductive Technologies in Egypt." In Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies, eds. Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen, pp. 263–282. Berkeley: University of California Press.

External links

• Official website
• Faculty page at Yale
• Curriculum Vitae
• An interview with Marcia Inhorn, Somatosphere, March 10, 2010.