Susan Greenhalgh is an author, anthropologist, and specialist on contemporary China.

Her interests lie in the entanglements of state, corporation, science, and society, and their consequences for human health and social justice writ large.

Across her various projects, Greenhalgh’s overarching goal is to use the concepts and methods of two fields — anthropology and science studies — as well as access to unique data sources, to provide the in-depth insights of a humanistic scholar into critical issues of the day.

Over the last few decades, as the world and its worries have turned over and over again, her research focus has shifted dramatically. Among her concerns are the corporate distortion of science, the hidden politics of the obesity epidemic, and medicine’s tendency to err. In China, she has dug deeply into the making and effects of the one-child policy, as well as the role of science and technology in the nation’s global rise.

At the heart of these various research projects is a concern about the operations and effects of institutionalized power – how it works, what effects it has, especially in the lives of ordinary people, and how it masks itself, with the goal of holding power accountable for what it does in the world.

Greenhalgh has authored six books and edited or co-edited four collections. Her essays have appeared in journals and edited books in anthropology, China studies, foreign affairs, science and technology studies, women and gender studies, population studies, and medicine and public health.

She is the John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society emerita in the Anthropology Department at Harvard University. Before joining Harvard in 2011, she was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine and, before that, Senior Research Associate of the Population Council in New York City. She earned her doctorate and master’s degrees in anthropology from Columbia University and her undergraduate degree in psychology from Wellesley College. She also received a Certificate of East Asian/China Studies from Columbia’s School of International Affairs.

Greenhalgh’s work has been recognized by several life-time career achievement awards. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Harvard’s Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship, the Clifford C. Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement of the Population Association of America, and the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for Excellence in Writing and Editing in the Population Sciences. Her book on the origins of China’s one-child policy, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China, took the top book prizes in China studies and science studies and earned honorable mention in two major book competitions in anthropology. Her research has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the American Association of University Women, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and multiple research centers at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California, Irvine.

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