Professor Ann Kelly

Ann H. Kelly is a Professor in Anthropology and Global Health. She serves on the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) for Ebola Vaccines and Vaccination. She is also on the Editorial Board of Economy & Society, Cultural Anthropology, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications and Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

An anthropologist by training (Cambridge University, 2007), her ethnographic work focuses on the socio-material conditions that structure the production of global health knowledge, and the local ecologies of labour that circumscribe its circulation and use. She is currently collaborating on number of transdisciplinary collaborations at the interface of infectious disease control, health system strengthening and global outbreak response.

Her work has received support from a wide range of funders, including the Wellcome Trust, the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. Recent work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Social Studies of Science, Social Science and Medicine, Economy and Society, American Ethnologist and Medical Anthropology.

Ann is currently completing a manuscript, Pragmatists in the Tropics, with Javier Lezaun under contract with Duke University Press. The book explores the past, present and potential future of global health though the lens of mosquito control. It draws upon our experience working with medical entomologists in Africa and Latin America to advance a ‘tropicalized’ version of pragmatism, a new way of inquiring into the interplay of knowing and doing in relation to pathogens, vectors, and disease.

Research

• Emergency research and transitional research practices
• Politics of global health research
• STS of Africa
• Global health anthropology
• Social science of vector-control 
• Multispecies ethnography and zoonotic disease
• Critical global health of laboratory science

Ann has addressed a number of substantive topics, from mosquito control programmes in urban and rural contexts to emergency clinical trials during the recent West African Ebola outbreak.

In addition to working with a range of entomologists, biologists, parasitologists, public health experts and geneticists, she is currently working with a group of sustainable architects, urban designers and landscape artists in an effort to ‘hack’ fundamental paradoxes of mosquito rearing, collection and release.

Teaching

7SSHM Critical Global Health

PhD supervision

Ann is happy to supervise students looking to study in her area of expertise.

Further details

See Ann's research profile