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email: rlbarrett2@gmail.com
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Ron Barrett is a cultural and medical
anthropologist whose research has focused on religious healing, the
social aspects of infectious diseases, and the ways that human beings
come to terms with their own mortality. He has conducted fieldwork in
Northern and Western India as well as in the United States.
Dr. Barrett received his Masters and Ph.D. in
Anthropology at Emory University (1998 & 2002). He conducted
his doctoral research in the northern Indian pilgrimage city of Banaras
(a.k.a. Varanasi) where he studied the healing practices of an
unorthodox Indian sect known as the Aghori and their patients with
leprosy and other socially stigmatized diseases. This research is
the subject of a book, Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death, and Healing in Northern India,
published by the University of California Press in 2008. He has
also conducted U.S.-based research on the social dynamics of family
caregivers in home hospice.
More recently, Dr. Barrett conducted NSF-sponsored
research on health-seeking for influenza-like illnesses in a western
Indian slum community. He has co-edited a reader with Peter J.
Brown, Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology (2nd Edition),
which will be published by McGraw-Hill in 2010. In addition to
several book and encyclopedia chapters, he has articles published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Medical Anthropology, The Annual Review of Anthropology, and The Journal of Infectious Diseases.
He received his bachelors degrees in anthropology from
the University of Colorado (1990) and in nursing from Johns Hopkins
University (1992). He has worked as a clinical nurse in hospice,
brain injury rehabilitation, and neuro-intensive care. Prior
joining the faculty at Macalester, Dr. Barrett taught in the Department
of Anthropological Sciences at Stanford University for five years, and
in the Emory School of Nursing and Department of Anthropology for two
years. He has taught courses in medical anthropology, emerging
infections, ethnographic methods, and social theory. In addition,
he has taught overseas seminars on religion and healing in northern
India, and a comparative health systems course in Oxford,
England. He has also taught service-learning courses in which
students volunteered at a local area hospice in conjunction with
didactic seminars on the anthropology of death and dying.
Dr. Barrett (a.k.a. “Dr. Ron”) is joining
the anthropology faculty at Macalester in August, 2009. He will
be teaching courses in medical anthropology, cultural anthropology,
emerging infections, and the anthropology of death and dying.
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