Alexander Edmonds
Job Title
Professor of Social and Medical Anthropology
Room number
5.27Building (Address)
Chrystal Macmillan BuildingCity (Address)
EdinburghCountry (Address)
UKPost code (Address)
EH8 9LDResearch interests
Research interests
Edmonds is a social and medical anthropologist who has done long term ethnographic fieldwork in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Brazil. His current research is on psychiatry, war trauma, psychological vulnerability, and the politics of military violence in the UK. He received a five-year “Starting Grant” from the European Research Council to examine how soldiers and ex-soldiers navigate the military, healthcare, and social environments they face during and after military service.
He has also researched plastic surgery, beauty and medical enhancement. His award-winning book, Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex and Plastic Surgery in Brazil, examines how a nation with extremes of wealth and poverty became a global leader in cosmetic surgery.
Topics interested in supervising
If you are interested in being supervised by Alexander Edmonds, please see the links below (open in new windows) for more information:
Background
Edmonds was previously a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social Science and Global Health at the University of Amsterdam. He earned a BA in philosophy and religion from Stanford and a PhD in anthropology from Princeton.
His work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson Society at Princeton, the European Union 7th Framework Program, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
He has an interest in public-facing anthropology and has written about his research for media, including the New York Times, and been interviewed about his work by BBC radio, the Associated Press, and other international news outlets (see below for links).
Publications
Books
2010. Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex and Plastic Surgery in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press.
Awarded the Diana Forsythe Prize; the Eileen Basker Prize; the Sharon Stephens Prize, honorable mention; and the Roberto Reis prize, honorable mention.
Read the introduction to Pretty Modern
Journal articles and book chapters (selected)
Edmonds, A. 2025. "Army of the Vulnerable: Raising it, Fighting with it, Caring for it in Postimperial Britain." American Ethnologist. 52(3):309-323.
Edmonds, A. 2024. "Anthropology and Complicated People." American Ethnologist 51(1):57-62.
Edmonds, A and Leem, So Leon. 2021. "The Racial Politics of Cosmetic Surgery." In M.L. Craig (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics. New York: Routledge.
Edmonds, A and Leem, So Leon. 2020. "Making Faces Racial: How Plastic Surgery Enacts Race in the US, Korea and Brazil". Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(11): 1895–1913
Edmonds, A. 2017. "Fleshly Beauty." In S. Bunn (ed.) The Routledge Handbook on Anthropology and Beauty. London: Routledge.
Edmonds, A and Mears, Ashley. 2017. "Managing Body Capital." In E. Anderson-Fye and A. Brewis Slade (eds.) Fat Planet. Santa Fe: SAR Press.
Edmonds, A. 2016 “Does Sgt Pearson have PTSD?” In L. Manderson, A. Hardon and E. Cartwright (eds). Medical Anthropology in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge.
Edmonds, A and Nelson E, Ballestros M, Ecalada Soto D, Rodriguez O. 2014. "The Unintended Consequences of Sex Education: An Ethnography of a Development Intervention in Latin America." Anthropology & Medicine 21(2):189-201.
Edmonds, A and Sanabria, Emilia. 2014. "Medical Borderlands: Engineering the Body with Plastic Surgery and Hormonal Therapies in Brazil." Anthropology & Medicine 21(2):202-16.
Edmonds, A. 2014. "Surgery-for-Life: Aging, Sexual Fitness and Self-Management in Brazil." Anthropology & Aging Quarterly 34 (4)
Edmonds, A. 2013. "Can Medicine be Aesthetic? Disentangling Beauty and Health in Elective Surgeries." Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27(2):233-52.
Edmonds, A. 2013. "The Biological Subject of Aesthetic Medicine." Feminist Theory 14(1):65-82.
Edmonds, A. 2012. "A Right to Beauty." Anthropology Now 4(1):3-9
Edmonds, A. 2012. "Body Image in Non-Western Societies." The Encyclopedia of Body Image and Human Appearance. T. Cash (ed.) Elsevier. pp.238-242.
Edmonds, A. 2011. “Almost Invisible Scars”: Medical Tourism to Brazil. Signs 36 (2):297-302.
Edmonds, A. 2009. "Learning to Love Yourself: Esthetics, Health and Therapeutics in Brazilian Plastic Surgery." Ethnos 74(4):465-489. (Awarded David Edge Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science)
Edmonds, A. 2009. "'Engineering the Erotic': Aesthetic Medicine and Modernization in Brazil." In C. Heyes and M. Jones (eds.) Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer, pp. 153-169. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Edmonds, A. 2008. "Beauty and Health: Anthropological Perspectives." Medische Antropologie 20(1):151-162.
Edmonds, A. 2007. "'The Poor Have the Right to be Beautiful': Cosmetic Surgery in Neoliberal Brazil." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(2): 363-381.
Edmonds, A. 2007. "'Triumphant Miscegenation': Reflections on Race and Beauty in Brazil." Journal of Intercultural Communication 28(1): 83-97.
Edmonds, A. 2002. "No Universo da Beleza." ("In the Universe of Beauty") In M. Goldenberg (ed.) Nus & Vestidos. Rio de Janeiro: Record.
Teaching and research supervision
Edmonds teaches and supervises theses on a range of topics in medical and social anthropology and military studies, with a focus on mental health and emotion, psychiatry and psychology, and political violence. He is currently teaching the courses: "Anthropology of Health and Healing" and "Understanding Medicine" (both Honours), "The Anthropology of Health Illness (postgraduate), and "Culture and Mental Health in Global Perspective" (postgraduate). he is also Programme Director of the BMedsci Honours Programme in Anthropology and Sociology of Medicine.
Media (selected articles and interviews)
Read Edmonds' article, "A Necessary Vanity," in the New York Times.
Read "5000 Jahre Patriarchat" ("5000 years of patriarchy"), an anthropological discussion of the #MeToo movement in the Swiss newspaper, Blik (in German).
Read “La Beauté pour Tous” ("The right to beauty") in the Courrier International (in French).
Listen to roundtable discussion on vanity on the BBC World Service programme, "The Forum"
Listen to interview on BBC radio 4, “Thinking Allowed”
Listen to interview on BBC radio 4 programme, "A History of Ideas" (5:40 minutes into the programme)