We are pleased to announce that Professor Cortney Hughes has joined the Anthropology faculty in SOAN. Professor Hughes earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California Irvine with emphases in Feminist Studies and Medicine, Science, and Technology Studies. Her teaching and research interests are in medical anthropology, Islam, development, gender, public policy, Middle East studies, and applied anthropology. She conducted long-term research (2005-2009) on reproductive healthcare among working-class women in Rabat, Morocco. She focused on the ways the country’s new development policies impact how childbearing and childrearing practices are promoted to women and how women incorporate these practices into their ideas of citizenship. AnthroWorks, a popular academic blog, selected her dissertation on this subject as one of the Top 40 North American Dissertations in Cultural Anthropology for 2010. Before joining George Mason, Professor Hughes was a postdoctoral fellow at the Arlington Innovation Center for Health Research at Virginia Tech where she worked in conjunction with a healthcare organization in southwest Virginia developing projects to improve the quality of care in a rural Appalachian town. She has returned to her interests in Islam and the Middle East and is in the process of developing two new projects: one that examines the role of Islam in end-of-life care among Muslims in the Washington D.C. area as well as urban areas of the Middle East from a legal perspective and a second that looks at the intersection of religion and international development in Morocco. Professor Hughes is currently working on her book manuscript on her work on reproductive healthcare in Morocco. She has published articles in peer-reviewed anthropology and Middle East studies journals in addition to medical journals and has been a guest on NPR to discuss end-of-life care.
September 06, 2011
