Anita Hannig
Degrees
University of Chicago, Ph.D.University of Chicago, M.A.
Reed College, B.A.
Expertise
Socio-cultural and medical anthropology; anthropology of death and dying; anthropology of religion, gender, and the body; medical assistance in dying.Profile
Please visit my new faculty profile page.
Anita Hannig is associate professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, where she teaches classes on medicine, religion, gender, and death and dying. Anita’s work explores the cultural dimensions of medicine, with a particular focus on life's bookends: birth and death. In recent years, Anita has emerged as a leading voice on death literacy and education in the United States, appearing on podcasts and at community events that tackle Americans’ changing relationship with death.
Her writing has appeared in Cognoscenti, The Conversation, The Seattle Times, and Undark Magazine, among other publications. Anita has also spoken about her work in hospitals, medical schools, churches, art museums, and law schools across the country, and she has given interviews for The Washington Post, USA TODAY, The Boston Globe, Mashable, Insider, and other outlets.
In 2015, Anita launched a long-term, ethnographic research project on medical aid-in-dying in the United States. This project asked how assisted dying is transforming the ways Americans die. Anita spent hundreds of hours talking with patients, families, physicians, lawmakers, and activists across the country. As part of her research, she also served as a hospice volunteer and sat in on various court cases and public hearings. Her primary mission was to move beyond a polarizing national debate by uncovering people’s real-life experiences with assisted dying laws. This research resulted in her second book, The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America (Sourcebooks, 2022).
Anita’s first major research project explored the cultural dimensions of obstetric fistula, a maternal childbirth injury that leads to chronic incontinence and affects about one million women across the Global South. Between 2008 and 2010, she studied two fistula repair and rehabilitation centers in Ethiopia. This work culminated in several journal articles and her first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (The University of Chicago Press, 2017). The book upends the classic story of cultural primitivism a lay public has been told about this birthing injury and questions the idea of heroic global medical interventions. In 2018, Beyond Surgery was awarded the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology.
Anita earned her BA in Anthropology from Reed College and her MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. She is the recipient of an array of fellowships and grants, including from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. In 2018, she received the Michael Walzer ’56 Award for Excellence in Teaching from Brandeis University, and in 2019 she was named Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor at McMaster University in Canada.
In her free time, Anita enjoys aerial arts and making jam. She loves trail running, rock climbing, and backpacking in the great outdoors, pursuits that sporadically bring her in touch with her own mortality.
website: https://anitahannig.com/
twitter: @AnitaHannig
Courses Taught
| ANTH | 127a | Medicine, Body, and Culture |
| ANTH | 144a | The Anthropology of Gender |
| ANTH | 164a | Medicine and Religion |
| ANTH | 165b | Anthropology of Death and Dying |
| ANTH | 213a | Advanced Topics in Medical Anthropology |
| ANTH | 340a | Anthropology Graduate Proseminar |
Awards and Honors
Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor, Department of Religious Studies, McMaster University, Canada (2019 - 2020)
Mandel Faculty Grant in the Humanities (2019)
Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for Beyond Surgery, Society for Medical Anthropology, American Anthropological Association (2018)
Michael L. Walzer ’56 Award for Teaching (2018)
Bernstein Faculty Fellow, Brandeis University (2017 - 2018)
Provost Research Grant, Brandeis University (2017 - 2018)
Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (2015)
Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, University of Chicago (2011 - 2012)
Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (2010)
Century Fellowship for Graduate Study, University of Chicago (2006 - 2010)
Scholarship
Hannig, Anita. "Allow terminally ill patients from out of state to access aid-in-dying." The Seattle Times April 4, 2022
Hannig, Anita. "On my first Mother’s Day, I’m honoring the profound link between birth and death." Cognoscenti
Hannig, Anita. "Science and Sanctity: Biomedicine and Christianity at an Ethiopian Hospital." The Work of Hospitals: Global Medicine in Local Cultures. Ed. William Olsen and Carolyn Sargent. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 34-48.
Hannig, Anita. The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2022.
Hannig, Anita. "Assisted Dying Is Not the Easy Way Out." The Conversation February 18, 2020.
Hannig, Anita. "COVID-19 Won't Let Us Forget Our Maddening, Precious Mortality." Cognoscenti May 4, 2020.
Hannig, Anita. "Dying Virtually: Pandemic Drives Medically Assisted Deaths Online." The Conversation June 2, 2020.
Hannig, Anita. "How Our Assisted Dying Laws Work Against Some People Who Suffer the Most." Cognoscenti February 4, 2020.
Hannig, Anita. "The Complicated Science of a Medically Assisted Death." Quillette March 18, 2020.
Hannig, Anita. "Author(iz)ing Death: Medical Aid-in-Dying and the Morality of Suicide." Cultural Anthropology 34. 1 (2019): 53–77.
Hannig, Anita. "Leisure and Death." Rev. of Leisure and Death: An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying, by Adam Kaul and Jonathan Skinner. Anthropos vol. 113. 2 December, 2019.
Hannig, Anita. "Death and Dying 101." SAPIENS October 3, 2017.
Hannig, Anita. Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Heller, Alison, and Anita Hannig. "Unsettling the Fistula Narrative: Cultural Pathology, Biomedical Redemption, and Inequities of Health Access in Niger and Ethiopia." Anthropology & Medicine 24. 1 (2017): 81-95.
Hannig, Anita. "Sick Healers: Chronic Affliction and the Authority of Experience at an Ethiopian Hospital." American Anthropologist 117. 4 (2015): 640-651.
Hannig, Anita. "Spiritual Border Crossings: Childbirth, Postpartum Seclusion, and Religious Alterity in Amhara, Ethiopia." Africa 84. 2 (2014): 294-313.
Hannig, Anita. "The Pure and the Pious: Corporeality, Flow, and Transgression in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity." Journal of Religion in Africa 43. 3 (2013): 297-328.