School of Social and Political Science

Background

Laurie Denyer Willis is a medical anthropologist at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology, though she’s happiest when anthropology spills out of the university altogether into zines, soundscapes, sculptures, cookbooks, podcasts, films, and Edinburgh's streets and rivers. Laurie is committed to making anthropology bold, political, and a little unruly. She thrives on thinking and writing with others, and her research these days is deliberately collaborative, experimental, and open. 

Her first book, Go with God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil (University of California Press, 2023), takes readers into the contradictions of evangelical faith and populist politics in Rio de Janeiro's suburbs. It was awarded Honorable Mentions from both the LASA Brazil Section Award and the SLACA Book Prize, celebrated for sparking new conversations about faith, power, and the suburban city. Her book is part of the series Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century. 

Laurie’s research zigzags across religion, capitalism, feminist politics, sensory ethnography, and global health. She is recognised as a leading voice in critical global health, with expertise in antimicrobial resistance (AMR), infectious disease, and the religious far right. Her work is widely cited in global health policy, where she insists that scholarship should be accountable to the people and places it writes about. She co-directs the Feminist Cities CoLab, funded by the British Academy, where she works with collaborators across Latin America to imagine feminist urban futures. Her research is rooted in collaborative ethics and solidarity: she shows how urban health and safety are shaped not only by infrastructures and policies, but also by violence, neglect, and everyday creativity. Cities, in her work, are never just backdrops, they’re living terrains where competing and creative visions of care, security, and survival unfold. 

In the classroom, Laurie thinks of teaching as organized mischief. She flips the usual script, giving students the lead and letting anthropology unfold through play, big conversations, and experiments that blur the line between classroom and world. She designs courses where students don’t just learn anthropology, they do it: debating the news as it breaks, mapping the city’s hidden infrastructures, or building collaborative projects with community partners. Two of her favourite course inventions? “Anthropologists Read the News” an entirely unscripted course that follows the headlines in real time, and “Anthropology in Practice” where students engage directly with Edinburgh’s rivers, burns, canals, estuaries, and rainwater systems, revealing the intricate entanglements between human communities, diverse species, and our shared environments. Together with community groups, citizen scientists, activists, and local non-profits, students study the health of our waterways, from sewage discharges to river flies, fish, otters, and herons. In this course students will use water as a powerful lens to understand urban life, environmental justice, and public health challenges today.

For Laurie, teaching is a laboratory for creativity, criticality, and student-led experimentation.

She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology at McGill and her MSc in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is currently welcoming PhD students, especially those who want to make anthropology inventive and political. 

Selected Publications: 

2024. “Women Doing Fieldwork in the Margins”, In Subjectivity in Latin America’s Urban Margins, edited by Moises Kopper and Matthew Richmond. Berghahan Press. (co-authored with Luana Motta and Valeria Oliveira).

2023. Go with God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil. University of California Press, part of the competitive ‘Atelier Series’ in Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century. 

2023. The Politics of Irrationality: Antibiotic use, Chicken Farming & Global Health in Kampala, Uganda. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 37(4): 382-395. (co-authored with Miriam Kayendeke & Clare Chandler)

2023. Pharmaceuticalised Livelihoods: Antibiotics and the Rise of 'Quick Farming' in Peri-Urban Uganda. Journal of Biosocial Science, 55(6), 995-1014. (co-authored with M. Kayendeke, S. Nayiga, C. Nabirye, N. Fortane, S.G. Staedke & C.I.R. Chandler)

2023. Antibiotic ‘entanglements’: health, labour and everyday life in an urban informal settlement in Kampala, Uganda. Critical Public Health, 1-10. (co-authored with C. Nabirye, S. Nayiga, M. Kayendeke, S.G. Staedke & C.I.R. Chandler)

2022. Taking opportunities, Taking medicines: Antibiotic use in rural Eastern Uganda. Medical Anthropology, 41(4):418-430. (co-authored with S. Nayiga, S., S.G. Staedke & Chandler, C. I. R.)

2022. Reconciling Imperatives: Clinical Guidelines and the Enactment of Good Care in Lower-Level Health Facilities in Tororo, Uganda. Global Public Health, 17(12):3322-3333. (co-authored with S. Nayiga, S.G. Staedke & Chandler, C. I. R.)

2021. Antibiotic stories: a mixed-methods, multi-country analysis of household antibiotic use in Malawi, Uganda and Zimbabwe. BMJ: Global Health, 6 (11). (co-authored with J. Dixon, E. MacPherson, S. Nayiga, S. Manyau, C. Nabirye, M. Kayendeke, E. Sanudi, A. Nkaombe, P. Mareke, K. Sitole, C. de Lima Hutchison, J. Bradley, S. Yeung, R. Ferrand, S. Lal, C. Roberts, E. Green, S.G. Staedke, and C.I.R. Chandler. 

2020. In Attention to Pain: Governance and Bodies in Brazil. Medical Anthropology, 39(4), 348-360.

2020. Introduction to a Special Issue: Balancing the Quotidian: Precarity, Care and Pace in Anthropology’s Storytelling. Medical Anthropology, 39(4):297-304. (co-authored with Sandra Hyde). 

2020. Use of antibiotics to treat humans and animals in Uganda: a cross-sectional survey of households and farmers in rural, urban and peri-urban settings. Journal of Antimicrobial Resistance, 2(4):1-11. (co-authored with C. Nabirye, S. Nayiga, M. Kayendeke, S.G. Staedke & C.I.R. Chandler)

2019. ‘Quick Fix’ for Care, Productivity, Hygiene and Inequality: Reframing the entrenched problem of antibiotic overuse. The BMJ: Global Health, 4(4). (co-authored with Clare Chandler). 

2019. The ‘Drug Bag’ method: Lessons from anthropological studies of antibiotic use in Africa and South-East Asia. Global Health Action, 12(1):1-11.  (co-authored with J. Dixon J, E. MacPherson E, S. Manyau, S. Nayiga, Y. Khine Zaw Y, M. Kayendeke M, C. Nabirye C, C. de Lima Hutchison C, and C.I.R. Chandler. 

2018. Policy Report: Anthropology’s Contribution to AMR Control, in the edited volume AMR Control: Overcoming Global Antimicrobial Resistance. (co-authored with Clare Chandler)

2018. Ways of Smelling: An Interview with Laurie Denyer Willis, Cultural Anthropology. Interview by Pablo Seward Delaporte. 

2018. It Smells Like 1,000 Angels Marching: The ‘salvific sensorium’ in Rio de Janeiro’s Western Subúrbios. Cultural Anthropology, 33(2), 324-348.