Dr Michelle Pentecost

Michelle Pentecost is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Global Health. She is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and leads on the Trajectories project in collaboration with the Healthy Early Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI). She is an Academic Editor for PLOS Global Public Health and holds honorary affiliations to the University of the Witwatersrand, the Geneva Graduate Institute and the University of Cape Town.

Michelle has a dual training in clinical medicine (University of Cape Town, 2008) and medical anthropology (University of Oxford, 2017). Her publication record reflects her work across disciplines including anthropology, clinical medicine, urban studies, and public health, with a particular focus on critical approaches to global health and social medicine in Africa. Her primary research is focused on the social science of early life interventions, specifically in South Africa, where she has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork on maternal and child health as sites of global health knowledge production and intervention.

Her recently published book The Politics of Potential: Global Health and Gendered Futures in South Africa (Rutgers University Press, 2024) ethnographically examines how new scientific understandings of the developmental origins of health and disease constitute new forms of intergenerational responsibility that are racialized and gendered, and how these overlook the everyday potentialities that shape perceptions of the future in South Africa.

Michelle is also the lead editor of the Cambridge Handbook of DOHaD and Society: Past, Present and Future Directions of Biosocial Collaboration (Cambridge University Press, 2024), the first reference text for interdisciplinary research in the field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. Other recent publications appear in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Medical Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Ethnos, BMJ Global Health and The Lancet, in which she is the lead editor on a series on Revitalising Global Social Medicine.

In addition to the UKRI, Michelle’s work has received support from DFID, the Wellcome Trust and the British Academy.

Research

• Postgenomics in global health
• STS of Africa
• Global health anthropology
• Social science of early life intervention
• Maternal and child health
• Politics of medicine 
• Medical humanities

Michelle has an established research profile in the areas of postgenomics in global health, the social science of early life interventions, and the politics of biomedicine.

Her current research in South Africa investigates the social and ethical implications of public health interventions in the early life period from preconception to early childhood and develops innovative qualitative methodologies for studying the social factors that shape life trajectories. Read more at www.trajectories.co.za.

For more information and recent publications visit michellepentecost.net or follow on X @medanthdoc. 

Teaching

PhD Supervision

Michelle invites queries for PhD supervision in the following areas:

• Anthropology of global health
• Anthropology of science/medicine
• Science and technology studies
• History and philosophy of science.

Further details

See Michelle's research profile