Martha Lincoln
I am a medical and cultural anthropologist. Prior to joining the Anthropology Department at SF State in 2017, I received my Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Prevention Research Center, affiliated with UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Broadly, my research addresses the cultural politics of public health, biopolitics, and the effects of political economic change on health systems and health outcomes. I advise M.A. students with research interests in cultural and medical anthropology. Recent B.A. and M.A. advisees have joined MPH and Ph.D. programs at Columbia University, the University of Notre Dame, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins University.
Since 2008, I’ve conducted field research in Vietnam, with projects supported by the Social Science Research Council and IIE Fulbright. I’ve published research on Hanoi’s informal sector, stratification and deregulation in health care provision, the ghosts of war, alcohol use and drinking cultures, the redefinition of poverty under late socialism, and urban cholera outbreaks. My book, Epidemic Politics in Contemporary Vietnam: Public Health and the State, was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury Academic. With Van Nguyen-Marshall (Trent University) and Peter Zinoman (UC Berkeley), I’m one of the editors-in-chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies.
My current project is based in the United States. With the support of a Marcus Early Career Research Award from SF State’s College of Liberal & Creative Arts and a Scholars Award from the National Science Foundation, I’m studying affective economies in medical crowdfunding for cancer.
My comments on the cultural and political drivers of the COVID-19 pandemic have appeared in articles in national and international media including the BBC, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. I’ve published opinion essays on pandemic matters in Nature, The Hill, Le Grand Continent, USA Today, CNN, and Washington Monthly. My collected public-facing writing can be found here.
Recent Publications
2025. "From ‘in this together’ to ‘a winter of severe illness and death’: Narrating national pandemic outcomes in the United States, 2020–2023." In Crisis, inequity, and legacy: Narrative analyses of the COVID-19 pandemic. Silvia Camporesi, Mark Davis, and Sanny Mulubale, eds. Oxford University Press. 10.1093/9780197778982.003.0006
2025. Kenney, Martha and Martha Lincoln. “Let them eat large language models: Artificial intelligence and austerity in the neoliberal university.” Preprint: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/6z5pa_v1
2025. “The revolution will not be crowdfunded: Alternative philanthropy’s politics.” Journal of Philanthropy. https://doi.org/10.1002/nvsm.70040
Courses Taught
ANTH 120: Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
ANTH 300: Foundations of Anthropology: History
ANTH 305GW: Writing Anthropology - GWAR
ANTH 630: Medical Anthropology
ANTH 631: STEM and Social Justice
ANTH 715: The Craft of Anthropological Writing
ANTH 723: Seminar in Problems in Cultural Anthropology