Elise Andaya

Elise Andaya is a cultural medical anthropologist with research interests at the intersection of reproductive health care, gender, and health policy in the United States and Cuba. She is currently working on a book project examining the effects of service sector work and health policy on pregnant minority service workers in New York City, and is engaged in rapid research on the effects of COVID-19 on reproductive health disparities in New York. Her research on abortion policy is also attentive to inequities of race and class in determining access to abortion care in the US.

She has published numerous articles and book chapters on reproductive healthcare and reproductive policy. Her monograph, Conceiving Cuba: Women, Reproduction and the State in the Contemporary Era (2014) won ReproNetwork’s Adele E. Clarke Award for the Best Book in Reproduction and was recognized with an Honorable Mention by the Association of Feminist Anthropology in its Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize for Best First Book in Feminist Anthropology. Her article, “The Erosion of Rights to Abortion Care in the United States: A Call for a Renewed Anthropological Engagement with the Politics of Abortion.” (2017, co-authored with Joanna Mishtal) was one of Medical Anthropology Quarterly’s most downloaded articles in the 12 months following its publication. Most recently, her article, Race-ing Time: Clinical Temporalities and Inequality in Public Prenatal Care, was published in Medical Anthropology (2019) as part of a double special issue on race and reproduction.

Research Interests

USA; Cuba, Latin America, the Caribbean; gender; kinship and reproduction; medical anthropology; health and reproductive health care; systems of inequality.