Photograph — Jesse Dittmar
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Photograph — Jesse Dittmar
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Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World
Why are allergies on the rise — and what do our irritated bodies say about the world we have made? Blending science, history, and the stories of patients and researchers, Allergic is a sweeping investigation of one of the defining health questions of our time.
A Pathography of the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic · Cornell University Press, 2014
An ethnography of a pandemic as it unfolded — following virologists, epidemiologists, and public-health officers through the 2009 H1N1 outbreak to show how global flu science actually works: in labs, in databases, and in the fragile networks that connect them.
From allergy and epidemics to failure and aging — talks that bring a medical anthropologist's eye to the questions our bodies keep asking.
The talk behind the book — why allergies are rising worldwide, and what our irritated bodies reveal about a changing environment.
What the outbreaks we no longer talk about can teach us about the ones still to come.
Lessons from "Failure 101," the course she created to teach students how to fail — and why it matters.
On the science and culture of anti-aging — the subject of her next book.
Represented by the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau
"Allergy is an individual biological problem, but that's not all it is. It's also a community problem."
— Theresa MacPhail, on NPR's Fresh Air
Science writer, medical anthropologist, and associate professor of Science, Technology & Society at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Theresa MacPhail is a medical anthropologist, writer, and Associate Professor of Science & Technology Studies at Stevens Institute of Technology. A former journalist, she writes about health, medicine, and the systems — biological and social — that shape both.
Her path into allergy research is personal. In 1996 her father died of anaphylaxis after a bee sting; MacPhail, an allergy sufferer herself, spent years trying to understand the biology behind that loss. The result was Allergic, an investigation of why our immune systems are increasingly at odds with the world around us.
She lives in Brooklyn, and is at work on a book about the science and culture of anti-aging.
Doctorate in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco.
Named a Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her research and writing for general readers.
Associate Professor of Science & Technology Studies, teaching the anthropology of science, medicine, and risk.
At Stevens she created "Failure 101," a course built on an unusual premise: that students should practice failing. Drawing on her own winding path — journalist before academic, outsider before expert — the course asks what risk, error, and dead ends actually teach, and why a life without failure is a life without experiment.
Dispatches on allergies, aging, and the anthropology of medicine — plus news of talks and the next book.
Speaking — Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau
Books — Isabelle Bleecker, Nordlyset Literary Agency
Press — Random House publicity
Social — Instagram · X · Substack
Academic — Stevens Institute of Technology