Eliza Williamson, Ph.D.

I am a medical anthropologist specializing in disability, care, and health equity in contemporary Latin America and the United States. My current book manuscript, Care After Zika: Mothers, Children, and Disabled Futures in Brazil, is based on a decade of engaged ethnographic research with families caring for children diagnosed with congenital Zika syndrome in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. I am also working on a second book project on birth equity and maternal health policy worlds in Brazil, based on ethnographic research since 2011 on national programs designed to “humanize” birth care in the country’s universal public healthcare system.

I am also currently developing two applied, community-engaged research projects: one on the newly classified sound sensitivity disorder misophonia, the other on environmental health activism around PFAS (“forever chemical”) contamination in southern Colorado.

You can learn more about my past and current work at www.elizawilliamson.com.

• Postdoc, Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University
• PhD, Cultural Anthropology, Rice University
• MA, Cultural Anthropology, Rice University
• Graduate Certificate, Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Rice University
• BA, Women and Gender Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
• BA, Spanish and Portuguese Language and Culture, University of Colorado Boulder

• Williamson, K. Eliza. 2026. “Debilitating Care: Mothers and Children in the Aftermath  of Zika in Brazil.” In Histories of Disability in Latin America, edited by Heather Vrana and David Carey Jr. Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Williamson, K. Eliza. 2024. “Habilitating Bodyminds, Caring for Potential: Disability Therapeutics after Zika in Bahia, Brazil.” Cultural Anthropology 39 (1): 1.
• Williamson, K. Eliza, Cíntia Engel, and Helena Fietz. 2023. “The Chronicity of Home-Making: Women Caregivers in Dis/Abling Spaces.” Space and Culture 26 (3): 468–82.
• Williamson, K. Eliza. 2021. “Interventive Care: Uncertainty, Distributed Agency, and Cesarean Section in a Zika Virus Epidemic.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 35 (2): 266–84.
• Williamson, K. Eliza. 2021. “The Iatrogenesis of Obstetric Racism in Brazil: Beyond the Body, beyond the Clinic.” Anthropology & Medicine 28 (2): 172–87.

• ANTH 1040: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
• ANTH 3010: Bodies, Medicine, and Power: An Introduction to Applied Medical Anthropology