Professor of Anthropology
New York University

Emily Martin is a professor of anthropology at New York University. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council and as president of the American Ethnological Society. Her research has been supported by Fulbright awards, a Guggenheim fellowship, and grants from the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. She is the author of The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in America from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Beacon Press); and Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton University Press).

For more information, see Emily Martin's website.

Public Lecture

Sleepless in America4/27/09 3:00-5:00pm Cushing 001

Exploring historical and ethnographic materials from the U.S. since WW II, this illustrated talk asks how and why sleep has recently become a complex management project dependent on discipline and attention.  Even dreaming (for Freud, a chance to hear the unconscious) has become an activity that can be optimized for increased productivity. Research from American public health experts and sleep scientists together with incitements from the bedding industry and the pharmaceutical industry have contributed to making American sleep an enterprise that demands continuous labor rather than providing “sore labour’s bath.” The experience of sleeping, as well as the effort to sleep in the correct, normal way, take different forms depending on one's gender and socioeconomic class.

Faculty/Graduate Student Seminars

Uncanny rounds: The unsaid in medical diagnosis4/28/09 12:00-2:00pm McGuinn 3rd floor lounge

 This paper explores elements of the uncanny and similar phenomena in psychiatric rounds for affective disorders. Since rounds are primarily meant to teach medical students how to arrive at correct diagnoses, illness categories are often explicitly described and analyzed. But the interactions between physicians, students,  and patients reveal far more about ambient cultural understandings of irrationality than anyone can explicitly articulate. In the case I focus on, the relevant site of the irrational is connected with racialization, inflected with gender as well. This racialization can be described in terms of the uncanny, the unsaid, or the unspeakable -- along the lines being developed in discoursive psychology by Michael Billig and others. In discursive psychology, phenomona that are often considered inner mental traits and dispositions are conceptualised instead as "discursive accomplishments" that can be actively produced during social interaction. Rather than treating such traits or dispositions as essentially unobservable inner processes, they can be understood as constituted through social activity, though sometimes the relevant social activity must be sought in separate contexts. In other words, forces in human life that people regard as dangerous or fearful need not reside only in the psyche: they may be hidden within public social processes including language.

Seminar Readings: Uncanny Rounds: The Unsaid in Medical Diagnosis

To attend the seminar, RSVP sociology@bc.edu.