Lawrence Cohen, associate professor of anthropology

Lawrence Cohen is an associate professor in the departments of anthropology and South and Southeast Asian studies at UC Berkeley. He is a social cultural anthropologist whose primary field is the critical study of medicine, health, and the body. He wrote “No Aging in India,” a book on Alzheimer's disease, the body and the voice in time, and the cultural politics of senility. He is now working on two projects: “India Tonite,” which examines homoerotic identification and representation in the context of political and market logics in urban north India, and “The Other Kidney,” about the nature of immunosuppression and its accompanying global traffic in organs for transplant. Most of his work has been in India; he has also worked in the United States and most recently in Malaysia. In addition to medical and psychiatric anthropology, Professor Cohen’s research interests are critical gerontology, lesbian and gay studies, and feminist and queer theory.