Katherine A. Mason

Associate Professor of Anthropology, Brown University | Co-Founder, the Pandemic Journaling Project

Katherine A. Mason, PhD, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brown University and Co-Founder of the Pandemic Journaling Project. She is a medical anthropologist whose research addresses issues in population health, bioethics, China studies, reproductive health, mental health, and global health. Her first book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic, based on fieldwork she conducted in southeastern China on the transformation of public health in China following the 2003 SARS epidemic, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. Infectious Change won the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize in 2019. Her scholarly work has appeared in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, The China Journal, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and the Journal of Infectious Diseases, among many other venues.

In addition to her work with PJP, Dr. Mason is also currently working on a book project on perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs), based on several years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork that she conducted in the U.S. and China between 2015 and 2021. She is a certified postpartum doula (DONA International) and holds a certificate in maternal mental health from Postpartum Support International. She earned her PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University in 2011.