2023 Keynote Information

Ken MacLeish, PhD, is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health & Society and Anthropology and Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on medical anthropology, the politics of American healthcare, war and the body, trauma and medicine, and medical science and technology. His research focuses on bodily and emotional experiences of contemporary war; war-related injury and illness categories; and the construction of veteran identity in policy, care practices, and American culture. His scholarship has appeared in Brown University’s Costs of War project and the journals Medical Anthropology, BioSocieties, the American Journal of Public Health, History of the Human Sciences, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Security Dialogue, Critical Military Studies, and Ethnos. He is the author of the award-winning Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton University Press, 2013), which explores how the biopolitics of contemporary war-making take shape in the everyday lives of the servicemembers, veterans, families, and care providers whose labor produces post-9/11 US wars. He is currently completing a book on veteran transition that focuses on veteran involvement in the criminal justice system; he is also at work on a book on military suicide and a collaborative research project on war-zone waste disposal, pollution, and toxic exposure.